China to become first country with e-commerce surpasses 50% of retail sales

Market research company, eMarketer, forecasts that 52.1% of the country’s retail will come from online in 2021, up from 44.8% last year.

For almost every other country in the world, this datapoint remains far out of reach.

The country with the next highest rate of e-commerce as a share of total retail sales is South Korea, which eMarketer projects will transact 28.9% of its sales online this year.

In the US, the figure will be just 15%, and the average among Western European countries will be 12.9%.

Despite the US remaining just ahead of China in overall retail sales ($5.506 trillion vs. $5.130 trillion in 2020), China will outpace the US by nearly $2 trillion in e-commerce this year.

Several factors can be credited for this recent boom, including the rise of social commerce and livestreaming, WeChat’s Mini Programs, the groundbreaking Pinduoduo (PDD) group-buying-meets-social-networking phenomenon and the coronavirus outbreak.

In 2022, meanwhile, China is set for e-commerce sales growth of 11%, with its share reaching 55.6% of total retail. The $3 trillion threshold should be breached as well.

“Only two things will prevent nearly endless standout e-commerce expansion,” says eMarketer Forecasting Writer Ethan Cramer-Flood, of Insider Intelligence.

“Firstly, China’s overall retail sales growth is expected to be far more constrained in the coming years than it has been over the past decade, as China’s economic engine is not what it once was. “

“And second, several hundred million people in China are not yet online at all, and thus growth from these consumers will have to wait until a little later down the line.”