China’s Top E-Commerce Sites Saw 600% Growth in Mobile Shopping Last Year

We know that China’s netizens love shopping online – and collectively spend about $40,000 per second on local e-commerce sites – but most of that has been happening on desktop computers and laptops. Finally that’s changing. China’s top online stores, Tmall and Taobao, have revealed that purchases made via mobile devices soared 600 percent last year on the two sites.

Alibaba, the company that runs those two e-stores, says that the number of unique visitors to Taobao last year on its apps or on any mobile browser reached 300 million last year. The company’s blog says that, of those mobile visitors, 57 million (19 percent) made purchases on their phones. While that’s a sizable shift to m-commerce, mobile purchases still made up just 6.87 percent of all Taobao transactions in 2012. At least that’s way up from a mere 1.77 percent in 2011.

Indeed, as we noted previously in iResearch data for 2012 Q2, Taobao and Tmall lead the way in mobile commerce in China, punching above their general market share by accounting for 75.6 percent of mobile e-shopping buys. A few other sites also perform better than average, such as fashion e-tailers Vancl and MaiBaoBao. But quite a number of others are underrepresented on mobile, such as Amazon China.

“The speed of mobile adoption has been much faster than we thought it would be,” says Alibaba’s general manager for the mobile business unit, Alex Qiu. With booming smartphone adoption in China – now accounting for 73 percent of all phones sold – there’s still a lot of market share to be won and lost in the transition to greater m-commerce.

The ‘Taobao 2012 Mobile Shopping Annual Report’ adds a few other fun factoids:

• Women are the most active mobile shoppers spending an average of US$280 each last year on Taobao. Men spent $118 on average all year.

• An average of 9.28 million mobile users searched for products each day on Taobao.

• An average of 220,000 products were sold every hour through mobile devices in 2012 on Tmall and Taobao.

• 3.55 million Taobao vendors sold products via mobile devices last year.

• Mobile shopping is growing fastest away from major cities. Main cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou had 146 percent. In Changsha and Chongqing there was 167 percent growth. While in much smaller cities (so-called third- and fourth-tier cities) saw 180 percent and 230 percent growth respectively in mobile shopping.