Number of online shoppers in China 2014-2024
The graph shows the cumulative number of online shoppers in China from 2013 to June 2024. As of June 2024, about 904 million people in China had purchased goods online.
E-commerce in China
The past decade has seen rapid growth in the demand for online shopping opportunities in China. The number of online shoppers in China has been increasing exponentially from below 34 million in 2006 to over 466 million users a decade later, enabling this enormous spurt of China’s e-commerce sector. By 2022, digital buyer penetration rate in China has edged close to 59 percent.
China has been the world’s second-largest e-tailing market after the U.S. in recent years. As of 2023, the gross merchandise volume of online shopping in China had amounted to around 15.43 trillion yuan. By then, the volume of B2C e-commerce sales in China was expected to surpass 1.4 trillion U.S. dollars. The largest B2C e-commerce retailer in China with regard to gross merchandise volume (GMV) had been Tmall. The B2C online retail platform operated by Alibaba Group had generated a transaction volume of about 6.6 trillion yuan in 2020. The GMV of the leading C2C online retail platform taobao.com, also operated by Alibaba group, had reached almost 3.4 trillion yuan that year.
