Cross-border B2C e-commerce refers to the process in which enterprises and consumers in different countries or regions use Internet technology to query, select, purchase, and pay for goods, and finally deliver the goods to consumers through logistics. The target customers of cross-border B2C e-commerce are foreign individual consumers, so the purchase amount and quantity of a single transaction are generally low, but the transaction frequency is high, which is also called “cross-border e-commerce retail”.
In June 2015, Alibaba Research Institute under Alibaba Group and Accenture (a well-known consulting firm) jointly released a global cross-border B2C e-commerce trend report. The report stated that the global B2C e-commerce market has grown rapidly in recent years and will maintain an average annual growth rate of nearly 14% in the next few years. The transaction volume will increase from US$1.6 trillion in 2014 to US$3.4 trillion in 2020. Among them, the growth of global cross-border B2C e-commerce is particularly strong: the average annual growth of up to 27% will increase the global market size from US$230 billion in 2014 to nearly US$1 trillion in 2020. Compared with other retail forms, the cross-border B2C e-commerce market has the fastest growth rate, which will be twice the growth rate of the overall e-commerce (as shown in Figure 4-1). By then, the total number of cross-border B2C e-commerce consumers will also increase from 309 million in 2014 to more than 900 million in 2020, with an average annual growth rate of more than 21%, forming a strong digital consumption army.
Asia-Pacific has become the most important regional market in the world with its leading market size and strong growth momentum: in 2014, the cross-border B2C e-commerce transaction volume in Asia-Pacific accounted for 30% of the world, and this proportion is expected to rise to 48% in 2020. The consumer goods industry in the entire region is relatively developed and the countries develop in a staggered manner, which has become the driving force for market growth. Among them, East Asia, dominated by China, Japan and South Korea, has developed relevant infrastructure and a high penetration rate of mobile Internet, and is the core of the entire Asia-Pacific market. It is estimated that by 2020, the cross-border B2C e-commerce transaction volume in East Asia will account for 86% of the entire Asia-Pacific region and 39% of the world. Southeast Asia has become another hot spot in the Asia-Pacific region due to its rapid progress in regional economic integration and huge potential for economic development.
Although the mature markets mainly in Western Europe (including Southern Europe) and North America have a slower growth rate, the huge market base still ensures that the total transaction volume of the two markets exceeds 30% of the new markets. In terms of transaction volume, by 2020, they will still be the second and third largest cross-border B2C e-commerce markets in the world. The North American Free Trade Area and the European economic integration strategy, especially the Single Digital Market strategy, will greatly promote the development of cross-border e-commerce in the region. Western Europe has many smaller countries with limited local market size and is more dependent on cross-border channels for the supply of niche products; while the United States is not only an important market for cross-border B2C e-commerce, but also the most important source of goods for global cross-border B2C e-commerce. In many countries, the United States is the first source of products for consumers’ cross-border shopping.
Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa are fast-growing emerging markets. Among them, Latin America is the second largest emerging market after Asia-Pacific, and its annual average growth rate of more than 40% makes it the fastest growing region for cross-border B2C e-commerce in the world. The strong demand for imported consumer goods caused by the industrial structure is an important source of demand in these markets, such as Latin America and the Middle East, which rely on resource and primary product exports, and Central and Eastern European countries such as Russia, where the consumer goods industry is relatively underdeveloped in the industrial structure. At the same time, the relatively weak offline retail industry in these markets also leaves broad space for the development of cross-border B2C e-commerce in these regions.