 |
Survey: On-line Shopping Mushrooms in China
A recent survey shows that the number of Chinese on-line shoppers increased ten-fold from June 1999 to June 2000, with the growth rate faster than that for the number of netizens, according to the China Economic Times.
The survey was conducted from May 25 to June 5 by six media organizations including China Central TV and Beijing Youth Daily. A total of 200 websites and 1,000 people living in 20 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities were surveyed.
The figures show that China now has more than 600 on-line stores, selling a wide range of products for people's daily life.
Most of the on-line shops are concentrated in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Beijing leads all other cities in the service quality, the survey determined.
Beijing-based shop.eguo.com had the speediest delivery, with goods arriving in less than one hour. The slowest delivery time was eight days.
A similar gap also was seen in prices: Some sites offered low prices for promotional purposes, and the price difference for the same product at two sites was as high as 40 percent.
The quantity of on-line products has increased at dizzying speed in the past year, but the variety is limited. Beijing-based on-line bookstore dangdang.com listed 250,000 books, the most of any of the monitored e-shops.
The survey revealed that 72 percent of shoppers believe on-line stores are superior in terms of delivery, refund policies, and follow-up service than traditional stores, while 45 percent of them agree that when choosing home appliances and IT products, traditional stores are best.
The survey concluded that B2C on-line stores have a broad development prospect. The data showed that 21 percent of the netizens had on-line shopping experience and another 33 percent were willing to give on-line shopping a try.
Eighty-seven percent said that they will wait to test on-line shopping when delivery methods improve and security measures are heightened.
In This Section
|