China on course to build world's first trillion-dollar online retail market
Alibaba and JD lead the way with mobile transactions likely to dominate internet sales
The milestones set by the two companies on Tuesday of last week during the mainland's "Singles Day", the world's biggest online shopping festival, were a likely harbinger of how the domestic market would further develop, analysts said.
Alibaba saw its gross merchandise volume - the total amount of goods sold online - on that day reach 57.1 billion yuan (HK$72.3 billion), with about 43 per cent generated from mobile transactions.
That broke the Hangzhou-based company's own one-day online sales record of 36.2 billion yuan, posted on November 11 last year. It opened this year's "Singles Day" campaign for the first time to online shoppers from more than 200 countries through international platforms AliExpress and Tmall Global.
JD did not provide merchandise volume numbers, but said it doubled the amount it recorded last year, with more than 40 per cent of orders placed through mobile devices.
"Singles Day is the most influential e-commerce event in [mainland] China, and Alibaba showed in its Double 11 campaign that global expansion can accelerate online sales," Forrester Research senior analyst Vanessa Zeng said. "In addition, we see substantial potential for mobile transactions to dominate online sales in next year's Singles Day campaigns."