China's e-commerce boom brings shopping revolution (3)

Besides Alibaba, China's other e-commerce players have also reaped bountiful harvests in 2012. Three million orders were taken during a three-day burst of promotions from Nov. 9 to 11 on Suning.com, the website of China's top home appliance retailer. And Dangdang.com, one of China's biggest e-commerce sites, received orders worth 20 million yuan (3.2 million U.S. Dollars) on Singles' Day.

"We can call it a revolution to traditional shopping style," says Yang Bin, president of Beijing-based Analysys International. "The new age of e-commerce has already brought challenges to traditional retail as well as driving the domestic economy and creating jobs."

Indeed, e-commerce in China has become a behemoth worth many hundreds of billions of dollars. A total of 193 million Chinese regularly shop online, and by 2015, official statisticians expect, that number will have grown to 350 million -- half of China's forecasted online population.

Even the Chinese government is putting its weight behind e-commerce in its latest five-year plan, implementing policies in the hope of quadrupling annual e-commerce volumes from 2010 to 2015 to 2.9 trillion U.S. dollars, which will account for 9 percent of all Chinese retail. The number stood at 5 percent at the end of 2011.

If Alibaba is anything to go by, this aim is achievable. About 800 million items are on sale via stores on its two online platforms, luring more than 60 million visitors a day. As many as 48,000 items are sold every minute on Taobao.com alone.