China most popular e-commerce destination, outruns US, UK

The Chinese online shopping has become most popular cross-border destination, displacing the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), in the world.

According to a cross-border trade report by online payment provider Pay-Pal and research firm IPSOS, many chinese platforms are striving to be global and have been
registering increase in numbers of user base. Last year, upto 21 percent of the 28,000 respondents from 32 countries said they shopped from Chinese websites.

Jack Ma's Alibaba Group is one of the best examples, whose international B2C marketplace AliExpress- it had more than 100 million overseas buyers from 220 countries and regions
by April 10, 2017.

AliExpress reportedly registered over 60 million active users. Almost 20 million of them had made purchases on the platform, reported Chinadaily. By 2025, Alibaba
expects to serve 2 billion consumers worldwide, among whom 1 billion would be overseas users said Shen Difan, general manager of AliExpress.

At a time when China is faced with some difficulties in exports, cross-border e-commerce platforms are raising fresh hopes for high economic growth.

Russian shoppers find China online market more attractive as per latest figure of Russia's largest e-payment service Yandex. They spent 80 percent of $4.3 billion
cross-border e-commerce trade on Chinese platforms.

Another leading platform JD rolled out its cross-border B2C platform in 2015, with an English version and a Russian version.

Data from internet market consultancy iResearch estimates the total cross-border e-commerce volume, including both retail and B2B sales, reached 6.3 trillion yuan
($921.9 billion) in 2016, a number that is expected to reach 8.8 trillion yuan by 2018. China's total online shopping rose 24.7 percent year-on-year to reach 4.7
trillion yuan last year. That was 14 percent of China's total retail volume, it added.

The government has announced related regulations in the past two years to facilitate the development of cross-border trade. China has been the world's largest online
retail market since it outperformed the US in 2013. Total e-commerce in China was worth 26.1 trillion yuan in 2016, almost 39.2 percent of the global volume.