How online shopping is revolutionising China's e-conomy... and even its villages
As e-commerce boom defies economic headwinds to grow 30 per cent year on year, benefits - and job creation - are being felt at all levels of society, from top-tier cities to remote farms
It has taken Xiao Jiana just six months to become the most popular person in the village of Yang – all thanks to the internet.
Her new job, helping residents buy things on Taobao, e-commerce giant Alibaba’s flagship customer-to-customer (C2C) platform, has won her many friends, including elderly residents who had previously never heard of the internet, and more tech-savvy shoppers who could not be bothered to do it for themselves.
“At the start, I thought elderly residents wouldn’t take to internet shopping, but now they use me to buy almost all their daily goods online,” Xiao, 22, said.
On the Singles Day shopping extravaganza on November 11, she helped residents in the village near Fenghua, in Zhejiang province, spend 470,000 yuan (HK$570,000) on Taobao.
Xiao is only one of the millions of people now making their living from e-commerce, one of the most robust mainland industries amid slowing growth in the world’s second-largest economy.
Five years ago, only 1.6 million people were working for e-commerce firms, and 12 million for e-commerce-related firms, the research centre said.