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.

More than 2.5 million people were employed by e-commerce companies by June, with a further 18 million working in e-commerce-related businesses, including logistics and individual shops on C2C platforms, according to estimates by the Hangzhou-based China E-Commerce Research Centre.

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.

Official data suggests that e-commerce retail sales are growing at a year-on-year rate of more than 30 per cent on the mainland as many young people, particularly women, turn to online methods of shopping.

This growing trend has been a boon to industry giant Alibaba, with its Taobao serving more than 90 per cent of the mainland’s C2C market, and its Tmall website catering to nearly 60 per cent of the nation’s business-to-customer (B2C) market. Alibaba racked up more than 90 billion yuan in sales this Singles Day, the annual shopping festival it created seven years ago.

The second-biggest player in the mainland’s B2C world is JD.com, which has a 25 per cent share, while the third-largest is Suning.com with 3.4 per cent, the research centre said.

The growing enthusiasm for online shopping has also spread to overseas outlets. There are no exact numbers but the number of people buying foreign products during the Black Friday shopping promotion on November 27 increased seven-fold compared with the total buying goods on the day last year using Alibaba’s Alipay system, the Beijing Morning Post reported.

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In Yang village, farmers are also trying to ride the wave of online interest. Xiao, who is a Taobao “rural partner”, is responsible for helping villagers buy goods or sell their farm produce on the website’s rural platform, Cun.taobao.com, launched a year ago as part of Alibaba’s efforts to tap the huge rural market.

She earns her income from people who sell goods, and is paid a commission once the purchase of an item listed on the website goes through. The commission varies from 8 yuan to 100 yuan, depending on the cost of each item. Xiao earns more than 7,000 yuan per month, which is much less than her income from her last business – running a brick-and-mortar shop selling women’s clothing in near Ningbo.

“But I believe it’s going to be a much better type of business in the future,” Xiao said.

“And what’s more important, I’m very happy now, because I feel that I’m really needed by other people in the village. What I am doing is changing the lives of the elderly men and women.

“Because of my job, they know there are vacuum cleaners and massagers, which are actually affordable, and that they can buy good quality underwear at a very low price.”

Yu Xiaoqin, leader of Taobao’s rural partnership project in Fenghua, said the company planned to have one partner in 300 rural villages within two years.

It has already established 65 rural village partners since it launched the scheme in April.

“It’s not only something lucrative, but also meaningful, as we give farmers access to new things and improve their lives,” Yu said.

For Kuang Yuhua, who lives 160km away in Yiwu, e-commerce has a bigger purpose. As the founder of an alliance of local retailers on Amazon, Kuang has been busy organising training and seminars on how to sell home-made products on overseas platforms.

Yiwu, a trade hub for cheap, low-end small commodities, which expanded dramatically in the 1990s and 2000s, is now struggling to revive its fortunes by moving its sales online and also upgrading its products.

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“Instead of the figure of total online sales, we must pay more attention to the quality of goods being sold, which are mostly low quality and not brand names,” Kuang said. “So far it’s still the low price that is mainly attracting people to shop online with us.”

Kuang said one of the big benefits of online sales was the ability to amass a large number of customers and get their feedback to guide offline production, improve quality and prioritise portfolios.

Kuang has already run hundreds of training sessions for local businesspeople who have started to get involved in cross-border e-commerce in the past year. His next mission is to help local businesses establish their brands and improve their quality and service.

“I believe manufacturing is the root of the economy, and the internet is simply a way to transform it and create new productivity,” he said.

Despite online retail’s stunning aggregate sales figures, it still makes up a relatively small portion of total social spending, and much of it comes at the expense of falling brick-and-mortar revenues, analysts say.

The National Bureau of Statistics said last month that more than 2.4 trillion yuan worth of actual goods were sold online in the first 10 months of this year, accounting for 10 per cent of total consumption over the same period.

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In comparison, the total value of goods sold online in 2010 was 513 billion yuan, which accounted for 3 per cent of total retail sales at the time, the Hangzhou research centre said.

In the United States, online retail sales amounted to US$250 billion, or 1.6 trillion yuan, in the first nine months, according to the US Department of Commerce. This made up about 7 per cent of the country’s total sales.

Zuo Xiaolei, a chief adviser at Galaxy Securities, a Chinese brokerage and investment bank, said that instead of recording overall sales numbers, it was important to consider the real contribution that e-commerce made to the overall economy.

The same was true when considering jobs created by e-commerce, she said.

“It’s true that a lot of goods are being sold online and a lot of jobs are created because of this, especially delivery services, but we should see how much of this is simply substituting sales and employment from physical stores,” Zuo said.

Neither the government nor leaders in the industry such as Alibaba or JD.com have released numbers in this regard, but a recent study on the mainland’s fast-moving consumer goods by management consultancy firm Bain & Co may offer an insight into what is going on.

The “China Shopper Report 2015” found that most retailers had opened fewer stores or even closed some locations on the mainland in the past two years, with the French hypermarket chain Carrefour having closed about 25 stores, and US behemoth Walmart shuttering about 30.

In contrast, online sales were continuing to prosper, rising 34 per cent last year, although this was down on the increase of more than 40 per cent reported in 2013.

The study also estimated that about 40 per cent of this increase came from shoppers who were merely switching channels – buying products online that they would have otherwise bought in stores – which means that about 60 per cent of the sales growth was organic.

Shi Lei, an economist at Fudan University, warned that along with this substitution of online sales from brick-and-mortar sales, a large amount of tax had been lost, because so far none had been levied on individual online retailers.

“China’s legal system has fallen behind the development of the internet economy,” he said, adding that without a change, more physical retailers would perish.