In China, half of ecommerce spending will be on mobile in 2015

In China, online shopping done on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices will reach US$334 billion in 2015 – which means mobile shopping will account for a record high 49.7 percent of ecommerce expenditure.

The new data from Emarketer shows the 2015 projection will evince strong growth from China’s 2014 mobile commerce expenditure of US$180.4 billion, which was about 38 percent of all ecommerce retail that year.

Looking ahead a few years, Emarketer reckons that mobile commerce will grow strongly in China, albeit at increasingly slower rates. By 2019, ecommerce spending on mobile will hit US$1.41 trillion, when it will represent 71.5 percent of all online retail.

With mobile commerce set to account for half of China’s ecommerce spending this year, the country is about to pass a major milestone in its transition from the PC and internet boom of the mid-2000s to the new ubiquity of smartphones. This isn’t too much of a surprise since China had 557 million mobile internet users in 2014 out of a grand total of 649 million web users. (Update: two graphs showing CNNIC data have been merged into one chart, below.)

The numbers in the report have been foreshadowed by data from Alibaba, China’s top ecommerce company. At the end of 2014, Alibaba was seeing mobile-based consumers racking up 42 percent of the expenditure total on its Taobao and Tmall marketplaces. That was up from 20 percent in 2013. So Alibaba’s shoppers seem to be ahead of the curve on the shift to mobile.

United States of PC

While mobile commerce is prevalent across China, that’s not yet the case in the US. Emarketer reckons mcommerce sales in China will be 450 percent of those in the US in 2015. American shoppers will spend an estimated US$74.93 shopping from their mobile devices this year, which amounts to 22 percent of total ecommerce spending.

Even when projecting ahead to 2019, the US will still be nowhere near a milestone shift to mobile commerce – with an estimated 28 percent of online expenditure from mobile devices.