This year, more than half of the country's retail sales will be explained by e-commerce and in online sales, China will surpass the United States by more than 2 trillion dollars

The emarketer portal predicts that this year, 52.1% of China's retail sales will come from e-commerce, exceeding 44.8% the previous year and, by far, 29.2% in 2018. For the first time, the majority of retail sales in an entire country will be made online. The country with the next highest rate of e-commerce as a percentage of retail sales is South Korea, where emarketer projects 28.9% of online sales, while the United States will only reach 15.0% and the average among Western European countries will be 12.8%. Last year, physical sales fell 18.6% in China and are projected to fall another 9.8% this year. In comparison, e-commerce grew 27.5% in 2020 and will grow another 21.0% in 2021.

The foundations of China's e-commerce date back to stories from the 2000s and early 2010s:

The emergence of Alibaba, which provided reliable access and fast delivery of almost anything.

Digital payment systems, such as Alibaba's Alipay and Tencent's WeChat Pay, are years ahead of their Western competitors in usage and speed.
An uncomfortable, often conflictive, physical shopping culture motivated people to rely on e-commerce due to the ease of making returns and obtaining refunds.

Nearly unlimited low-cost delivery services, provided by millions of China's migrant workers, allowed companies like Alibaba and JD.com to offer same-day delivery for pennies.

Mobile commerce culture, driven by smartphones, existed from the beginning thanks to China's stage of economic development and the majority skipping the PC era and joining the Internet era directly through mobile devices.

Not all of these factors remain in force. Labor costs have skyrocketed and not everyone can deliver in hours and for pennies. In the early years, e-commerce was cheaper and more enjoyable than going to the store. Thanks to this initial enthusiasm and its huge population, China is today far ahead of the world in online sales. Although the United States remains ahead of China in overall retail sales, China will surpass it online this year by almost $2 trillion.