Research Topic and Rationale

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Our assignment topic would be E-Commerce in China. We choose China because the potential in China has blossomed over the past years. As we all know, China is the world’s most populous nation with approximately 1.3 billion populations. The number of internet user in China is 59.1 million (Mindrelief, 2007). China is a country considered to have low density population and delivery and distribution problems are common due to under development infrastructure (Mindrelief, 2007). However, the government ‘s strong support has helped China grow massively in using internet (Mindrelief, 2007). The speed of China’s internet infrastructure has been improving rapidly in terms of international bandwidth to the internet and domestic connections between China’s internet backbone providers . This is mainly due to the emergence of competition as the government gave approvals to two new internet backbone providers – UniNet and CNCNET ( Mindrelief , 2007).

Since then, many companies have ventured into click and mortar hybrids to be on par with the trend and keeping close with customers . However there are issues that customers are doubtful of for instance, quality of products, after service or security/ privacy issues.

In 2009, China's e-commerce market totaled 263 billion RMB (approximately $38.5 billion) with growth equivalent to about 105% increase year-on-year (Readwriteweb, 2010). Currently, consumer-to-consumer (C2C) represents the largest segment of China's e-commerce market; however, business-to-consumer (B2C) is increasingly growing in importance due to two trends (Readwriteweb, 2010). Therefore, e-commerce in China is definitely booming fast.
In this assignment, we will we focusing only on a handful of China top websites like Taobao, QQ ,Baidu and few others. We are curious to know how these mega companies succeed.

Therefore, we would like to explore further e-commerce strategy used by top Chinese websites and challenges faced by these websites.

References:


E-commerce opportunities in Modern Business China,http://www.mindrelief.net/e-commerce_opportunities.html, , viewed 27 September 2010

Chinese E-commerce Tops $38.5 billion, What Comes Next? http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/chinese_e-commerce_tops_385_billion_what_comes_next.php, viewed 27 September, 2010