The long-awaited Forrester Asia Pacific Online Retail Forecast 2011-2016 has just been published. The report, which highlights online retail sales in five different markets in Asia Pacific: China, Japan, Australia, South Korea, and India, notes that while Japanese, Korean and Australian e-commerce continues to maintain modest growth, it is above all in China that truly impressive growth rates are set to continue unabated.
While China's online retail market surpassed $100 billion in 2011, this is still significantly smaller than the US e-commerce market. However it is still growing at a much more rapid rate than the US online retail market was when it was at a similar size.
This implies that China’s e-commerce still has room to expend and thus potential for profit. Similarly, although India's eCommerce market is by far the smallest of those covered in the forecast, it is poised to grow from its small base by more than 500% by 2016 due to a rapid increase both in the number of online buyers and per capita online spending increase.
This market is gaining more attention as global brands look to markets that are in the early stages of eCommerce adoption but offer significant long-term potential.
