Global e-commerce maintains a strong momentum of development. According to statistics released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the scale of the global e-commerce market reached 25 trillion US dollars in 2015. In 2016, the global online retail transaction volume reached 1.845 trillion US dollars, an increase of 23.7% over 2015; the global retail sales in 2016 were about 21.396 trillion US dollars, an increase of 5.2% over 2015, and the proportion of online retail transactions in the global retail sales increased from 7.4% in 2015 to 8.6%. In 2017, the global online retail transaction volume reached 2.304 trillion US dollars, an increase of 24.8% over the same period last year; in comparison, the global retail sales in 2017 were 22.64 trillion US dollars, an increase of 5.8% over the same period last year, and the proportion of online retail sales in the global retail sales increased to 10.2%. Against the backdrop of the gradual slowdown in the overall growth rate of global retail, the rapid development of online retail is of great significance in driving the sustained growth of the global retail market.
By region, Asia Pacific is the region with the highest online retail sales, and the gap with other regions is still widening. Since becoming the largest single market region for online retail in 2013, the average annual growth rate of online retail in Asia Pacific has remained above 20%, with the most obvious growth in emerging economies such as China, India and Indonesia.
Due to the early start of developed countries, the online retail sales base is large, and the overall trend has been rising in recent years. In comparison, the Latin American market and the Middle East and North Africa market are much smaller, which is related to their own economic size on the one hand; on the other hand, the e-commerce market in these regions started late, and the related supporting infrastructure and upstream and downstream industries are not perfect, but the overall development trend of the e-commerce market in these regions is good and has great growth potential.
While the overall e-commerce is booming, the market size of cross-border e-commerce, especially cross-border B2C e-commerce, has grown significantly. According to the Global Cross-Border B2C E-Commerce Market Outlook Report jointly released by Accenture Strategy and Alibaba Research Institute, the global cross-border B2C e-commerce market size is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 27% from 2015 to 2020, more than double the growth rate of the overall e-commerce market. The cross-border B2C e-commerce market size will increase from US$230 billion in 2014 to US$994 billion in 2020, accounting for 29.3% of the global B2C e-commerce transaction volume and 13.4% of the global consumer goods imports in that year. The number of cross-border B2C e-commerce consumers will also increase from 309 million in 2014 to more than 900 million in 2020, accounting for 44.6% of the global B2C e-commerce consumers in that year, with an average annual compound growth rate of 20.4%.