Russian shoppers flock to Chinese sites

An advertisement for online shopping site Taobao.com of Alibaba Group is seen at a metro station in Shanghai, Nov 12, 2014. [Photo/IC]

China's e-commerce sites have captured 70 percent of cross-border online sales with Russia, valued at $3.5 billion in 2014, said China Securities Journal on Wednesday, citing a research report from Russia.

The country's booming e-commerce market has received widespread popularity, as evidenced in the research report jointly conducted by East-West Digital News, a Russian digital news information provider, and Internet company Yandex, which operates Russia's largest domestic search engine.

It said that online Chinese stores received 50 million orders from Russia last year, up 40 percent year-on-year.

Among China's popular online shopping websites, AliExpress, the cross-border e-commerce site of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, received the most orders, followed by Taobao.com, Tmall.com, DX.com, Dangdang.com and the Lightinthebox, according to the research report.

Most of the transactions are paid through Yandex.Money, Russia's largest electronic payment service operated by the company. Yandex provided payment services for about 40 Chinese online shopping stores by 2014, the report showed.

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China's e-commerce market expands by 31% in 2014 by Xinhua

China's e-commerce market hit 13.4 trillion yuan ($2.2 trillion) in 2014, up 31.4 percent year on year, according to a report released on Wednesday.

The volume of business-to-business (B2B) market reached 10 trillion yuan, up 21.9 percent. Online retail trade reached 2.82 trillion yuan, up 49.7, according to the China E-Commerce Research Center (CECRC).

B2B business and online retail respectively accounted for 74.6 percent and 21 percent the market.

As of the end of 2014, more than 2.5 million people worked directly in e-commerce and more than 18 million indirectly.

E-commerce is a new growth engine for China's economy and has strong impacts on the IT market and business models of traditional industries, including the retail, education and medical care, said Zhang Zhouping, a CECRC analyst.