China's rural e-commerce consumption continues to grow this year, the market will reach

China's rural e-commerce consumer market has continued to expand in recent years, and the size of the national rural online shopping market is expected to reach 180 billion yuan in 2014, according to the Rural E-commerce consumption report (2014) released by Ali Research Institute on the 13th.

According to the report, in the sample survey, the acceptance rate of online shopping by rural residents reached 84.41%, and the per capita annual online shopping consumption was about 50-2000 yuan, mainly concentrated in daily necessities, clothing, home appliances and other categories.

Taking Taobao's online shopping data as an example, the proportion of rural consumption has risen from 7.11% in the second quarter of 2012 to 9.11% in the first quarter of 2014, according to the report. Gao Hongbing, vice president of Alibaba Group, said that although the proportion is still low, it shows a steady upward trend, and with the steady increase of rural netizens and Internet penetration, the rural e-commerce consumer market has great potential, and the total market volume is expected to exceed 460 billion yuan in 2016.

The report shows that China's rural online shopping consumers are younger and more mobile than urban netizens. Among them, the proportion of rural netizens under the age of 30 is higher than that of urban netizens, while the 20-29 years old is the largest group of rural netizens, accounting for 32%. At the same time, 84.6 percent of rural netizens used mobile phones to surf the Internet in 2013, 5 percentage points higher than in cities and towns.

According to the analysis of the report, low prices, rich commodities and convenient purchase are the "inherent advantages" that online shopping is becoming more and more popular among rural consumers, while with the continuous improvement of infrastructure construction such as Internet and logistics in rural areas, the development of rural online merchants and e-commerce platforms, as well as the pull effect of a large number of migrant workers coming to cities to contact and use online shopping, the consumption mode of online shopping in rural areas will become more and more popular in the future. And continue to narrow the gap with urban consumption habits.

Constraints still exist. According to the report, broadband, payment and logistics are the three major factors restricting rural online shopping. In 2013, the penetration rate of rural broadband population was only 6.3%, lower than 12.6% in cities and towns, and the online payment utilization rate of rural Internet users was 25.7%. It is 22.2 percentage points lower than that in cities and towns. "Broadband is not wide", "payment is not easy", "express delivery stops in villages and towns" and other problems still plague the vast rural areas.

Gao Hongbing said that on the one hand, the development of rural online shopping needs to rely on the government's overall planning and reasonable guidance to create a good service environment for local e-commerce and logistics, on the other hand, it needs various e-commerce platforms to further invest in basic investment and innovative services, and build a rural e-commerce ecosystem.