Published: 2:06pm, 16 Dec, 2015 Updated: 2:54pm, 20 Jul, 2018
As China's 300m members of the middle class drive domestic consumption with their increasing use of smart mobile devices, plans for the expansion of China's e-commerce industry are being buoyed by the recent successes of the Alibaba group. By building a "digital silk road" China hopes to boost "consumption power" in China even further and continue to drive the economy forward, so that it will account for 50% of the global e-commerce retail market by 2015. China's potential online successes may also help the Asia-Pacific region’s total sales to reach projections of $1.892tn. Indeed, eMarketer has suggested that e-commerce in China is forecast to account for 28.6% of total retail sales in the country by 2015, up from an estimated 15.9% for 2018.