China's Super Consumers: What 1 Billion Customers Want and How to Sell it to Them

Chapter 15E-commerce and the Rise of Alibaba

Q: What is the most commonly spoken language on the Internet?

A: If you answered English, you would be wrong. The answer is Mandarin Chinese and its sister languages and dialects.

Perhaps no channel more typifies the rise and influence of China's super consumers than the massive scale, desire for, and money spent on e-commerce—including e-retail, e-wholesale, and digital information and entertainment products.

This is mainly due to the fact that the rise of retail, consumption, and brand awareness in China has been almost concurrent with the digital disruption of retail and commerce in general globally. As with many other developments in China, the lack of a legacy infrastructure meant that Chinese e-commerce could develop on a mostly blank slate without needing to tear down the old in order to make way for the new. Other examples include the ubiquity, speed, reliability, and low cost of China's mobile phone sector or the ability to build 60,000 miles of new highway without having to repair or replace the old.

While China was slower out of the gate in developing e-commerce as a key sales channel for consumer goods, it has not only caught up fast, but in many ways has surpassed the United States as the largest and most important e-commerce market in the world. The numbers are so staggering and the daily increase (yes, daily) of online shoppers is so rapid that we must acknowledge that, from the time we finish writing this chapter to ...