ONLINE shoppers in China spent 16.2 billion yuan (US$2.3 billion) in 19 major cities in the first half of 2008, the China Internet Network Information Center said yesterday.
The findings were based on a survey carried out in four municipalities - Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing - and 15 developed cities such as Dalian, Nanjing, Hangzhou and Guangzhou, among others.
About 8.4 billion yuan came from male consumers, while 3.1 billion was attributed to students.
The consumer-to-consumer site Taobao.com, a subsidiary of online portal Alibaba.com in which Yahoo! invested US$1 billion in 2005, was the nation's dominant Internet retailer with an online shopping penetration rate of 81.5 percent. Dangdang.com was second with 16.6 percent, followed by Joyo, Amazon's China subsidiary, with 13.6 percent. Eachnet, owned by Tom Online and eBay, had 8.4 percent.
Ninety-one percent of online shoppers who heard of Taobao had made purchases at the site, while 61.4 percent of those familiar with Joyo had shopped there, according to the survey.