The number of cross-border ecommerce buyers in the US will rise by only 4.5% (or 2.9 million) in 2022, but other markets are growing rapidly. China led cross-border ecommerce buyer growth with a 24.5% increase in 2020, and Shopify’s partnerships with Chinese tech giants like Alipay, and with ByteDance’s TikTok, will help its merchants more easily penetrate the market.

Is TikTok ready to take on Amazon? ByteDance wants to launch an international ecommerce platform; whether it rolls out as a TikTok integration, or as a standalone app, will be a litmus test for the strength of the US social commerce market.

In the US, Apple’s share of the market is even bigger. We estimate that the iPad holds a 47.8% share of tablet users in the US. We have no equivalent estimate for Fire tablet, but StatCounter estimated that Apple held a 58.1% share of the US tablet market in May 2021, with Amazon a distant third at 14.7%.

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Parcels in the US, Australia, and the UK most commonly originate from China, as many retailers ship goods from the country.

We estimate that in China—where many shoppers want products from leading international brands, including luxury labels—the number of cross-border ecommerce buyers rose by almost 25% in 2020, as consumers took advantage of both direct sales from brand websites and marketplaces that have opened the vast Chinese market to non-Chinese products.

In contrast, even pre-pandemic, Amazon accounted for a large portion of total US ecommerce sales, and its dominance has only continued to grow stateside. Have any other factors impacted D2C trading? As expected, Brexit has had an impact on companies selling via direct channels from Europe into the UK and on UK companies selling into the EU.

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.

In terms of the “where,” we need to consider that these holiday shopping days are largely artificial constructs in the UK, imported from the US where the Friday following Thanksgiving is a public holiday.

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.

With the US at its northern border, cross-border ecommerce has played an important role in spurring ecommerce adoption in Mexico.

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.

Generations of Canadians have a ritualistic dedication to searching for deals across the border, hopping in cars for day trips for lower prices on most goods, especially alcohol and gasoline. It is relatively simple for a country where 90% of its population lives within 100 miles of the US border. With the advent of online shopping, the trend continues.