China's e-commerce boom brings shopping revolution (2)

SHOPPING REVOLUTION

Lin's shopping preferences in the festive season sum up an excellent year for e-commerce in China, and a significant shift in consumers away from the high street as online vendors are expecting bumper Christmas sales.

She is just one of the millions of online shoppers who contributed to more than 1 trillion yuan (160 billion U.S. dollars) in revenue reaped in the first 11 months of 2012 by China's two biggest e-commerce platforms, Tmall.com and Taobao.com -- both affiliated with China's e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding.

Alibaba took in 19.1 billion yuan (3.06 billion U.S. dollars) on China's Nov. 11 'Singles' Day,' dubbed the world's largest online shopping spree. The revenue was twice that of this year's Cyber Monday, the United States equivalent.

A total of 6.4 billion yuan (1 billion U.S. dollars) was taken by 5,000 shopping outlets in Shanghai during the seven-day National Day holiday this year, and that amount was topped by Alibaba within half a day on Nov. 11, according to the company's own statistics.

Global research group Euromonitor even predicted in a recent study that Alibaba's Tmall will overtake Amazon in revenue by 2015, making Tmall the world s largest e-commerce site. Tmall's revenues should hit 120 billion U.S. dollars by 2017, according to Euromonitor, when Amazon's revenues will likely be 100 billion U.S. dollars.