Will 2012 Be a Tough Year for Chinese E-Commerce Sites?

Could this sign be appearing in the windows, er, on the homepages of e-commerce sites in China this year?

2012 is still young, especially in China, where the new year doesn’t really start until Spring Festival has wound to a close. And while the last few years have seen massive expansion in the e-commerce market and new companies springing up right and left, could 2012 be the year that sees that trend reverse? The China Business Journal thinks so.

The paper ran a lengthy article today with predictions for 2012’s e-commerce market. While e-commerce as a market is likely to continue to grow, that may not be enough to rescue smaller e-commerce sites, which the paper predicts will close in droves this year.

In part, that’s because many of these sites are nearing the average life expectancy for a small or mid-size company in China: three years. It’s also because as the biggest e-commerce companies — Alibaba, 360buy, Amazon — continue to grow and strengthen their own positions this year, smaller sites are likely to get left out in the cold. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for Chinese consumers, though; the paper frames it as part of the natural process of the maturing of the e-commerce market in China.

In fact, B2C sites are likely to speed their growth in 2012 — the big ones, anyway — because the massive investments that have been made in these companies over the last year. Investors, it turns out, put twice as much money into Chinese e-commerce (mostly B2C) last year as they did over the previous five years combined, and all that money should manifest itself in the market in the form of better services and faster growth. Of course, for the many smaller companies that didn’t get big investments in 2011, this is only going to leave them further behind than they already are.

The paper also suggests that the battle for the C2C market is already over, and Taobao has won.

We still don’t know for sure what 2012 will bring, but further e-commerce growth seems almost inevitable. Will this benefit the big guns but leave smaller companies out to dry? Only time will tell.

[China Business Journal via Sina Tech, Image via Shutterstock]