Cambridge Business Association
What China Reveals About the Future of Shopping
Article

What China Reveals About the Future of Shopping

The New Retail: Lessons from China for the West

Chris Biggs, Amee Chande, Erica Matthews, Pierre Mercier, Angela Wang and Linda Zou
Boston Consulting Group, 2017
Read the article

Read or listen offline

Amazon Kindle
  • 0.5×
  • 0.75×
  • 1×
  • 1.25×
  • 1.5×
  • 1.75×
1×

Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Eye Opening
  • Overview

Recommendation

When was the last time you called a cab, watched a talk show, ordered snacks, chatted with a friend and got your news fix, all from the same app? If you live in China you probably did that today, and you probably spent three times as long on these apps as an American would on Amazon. Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace and the “super app” WeChat provide users with all these services, and in return, users provide them with rich data that Amazon can only dream of. An expert team from the Boston Consulting Group highlights what the rest of the world can learn from China’s online marketplaces. getAbstract recommends these insights to readers who want to know how China’s “super apps” have seamlessly integrated the habits of daily life with online shopping.

Summary

Worldwide, people are doing more of their shopping online, and nowhere is this truer than in China. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, Chinese online shoppers spent $750 billion dollars in 2016 – spending more than US and UK online shoppers combined. And with forecasts predicting that individual consumers will continue to spend more and new consumers will flood the market as people in rural areas get access to the Internet, growth is unlikely to slow down in China. China’s rising middle class seems to have skipped personal...

About the Authors

Chris Biggs, Pierre Mercier, Angela Wang and Linda Zou write for the Boston Consulting Group, while Erica Matthews and Amee Chande provided insights from Alibaba.

Comment on this summary