Online shopping is fastest growing retail channel in China : Aquarius Asia

Furthermore, more than a third of online Chinese buyers spend more than 10 per cent of their total monthly spending online. While the percentage of online to retail sales currently stands at 3.4 per cent, it is estimated to grow in excess of 100 per cent over a span of a mere four years, providing further evidence of the lucrative potential of the Chinese market.

Aquarius also identified that the majority of online users and shoppers come from young and well-educated target groups with purchasing power, making them advertising relevant and susceptible to ecommerce measures.

Upon dissecting the current activities of the top 100 manufacturers of consumer goods (in the Amazon product categories) in the online space, Aquarius highlighted the following key findings: 

• Only 21 per cent of the top 100 companies provide links to their official or officially authorised digital stores at edealers on their own website, even though the majority of their products are sold there.
• 93 per cent of the analysed brands’ products are also sold via edealers. As aforementioned, however, only 21 per cent have links on their website to these edealers, which is seen as wasted sales support potential.
• 40 per cent of all manufacturers already operate eshops on their own websites. However, by comparing this percentage (40 per cent) with the percentage of the manufacturers’ products sold via edealers (93 per cent), sales via edealers is shown to have a better online reach to consumers. This could lead to generating more transactions and sales volume than sales via eshops on the manufacturers’ own websites.
• Breaking down the total results among the product categories, it is clear that none of the industries have utilised their online potential to a satisfactory degree. When it comes to the usage of links, the PC/ office segment is one of the forerunners. Here, 50 per cent of firms on average exhaust the possibilities for the transfer of traffic to stationary or digital dealers.
• The household appliance segment leads in natural and paid Baidu search hits (combination of search engine marketing and search engine optimisation) with 21 per cent.

Hong Kong-based Aquarius Asia, a subsidiary of Aquarius Consulting in Munich, develops digital concepts for its clients across the Asia-Pacific region.