Already No. 1 in ecommerce, China will overtake the US this year to become the world’s largest overall retail market for the first time.

Despite looming tax changes to cross-border ecommerce goods set to go into effect in January, eMarketer expects strong demand for overseas goods in China to continue. In fact, in its latest forecast on China, eMarketer has raised its growth projections for 2019.

China. Asia-Pacific, and China in particular, is Amazon’s largest untapped market, and one of the major reasons why Amazon’s share of worldwide ecommerce sales remains low.

Growth of retail sales in China is declining, due to economic and geopolitical challenges, and will not overtake the US until 2021. But retail ecommerce has continued to flourish in some surprising ways under these current circumstances.

Global trends shifting shopping, including omnichannel selling, the rise of “New Retail,” cross-border ecommerce, social commerce, and top ecommerce players like Amazon and Alibaba and why marketplaces are dominating worldwide.

We also examine their current strategies for expansion and consider the steps they may take in the future to grow their businesses, both in China and abroad.

All of the EU-16 countries combined represented about the same amount of cross-border ecommerce as China, far and away the most important market for cross-border sales today. We estimate that it will account for $144.11 billion in 2019, up 18.5% from the previous year. Several factors contribute to cross-border shopping in China, which is often, but not exclusively, driven by more affluent consumers.

A March 2020 study conducted by Instituto QualiBest found that 20.0% of Brazil’s internet users stopped buying products online from China. Nearly as many stopped going to indoor (19.9%) and outdoor events (17.8%).

China’s fast-paced retail ecommerce growth hasn’t spelled doom for physical stores. Rather, brick-and-mortar is undergoing a transformation of its own, underlined by an infusion of technology and the growing integration between online and offline.