e-Retail Market Characteristics: Evidence from Comparisons with USA, UK, India, and China - Innovative Management in Information and Production - page 136

same period of CR 100 -76 %.The e-retail industry is a highly oligopolistic industry
in China. The CR 4 and CR 8 from 2007 to 2009 of the US e-retail are below 40 %,
which means it is a competitive industry. In China C2C (customer to customer) e-
retail market such as Taobao.com accounted for the largest market share, followed
by a paipai.com and eBay.
However, to some extent, Chinese oligopolistic market structure shows the
advantages of several major pioneering e-retail platforms firstly entering the market.
It is not the result of perfect competition. The e-retail is an emerging industry;
there is still potential in its market structure ( Zhuang and Chan 2006 ). According to
the industry characteristics and policy support factors, we can estimate that e-retail
market concentration will be flat, but the market structure will continue to maintain
a high concentration of an oligopoly.

3.5 Regional Characteristics

With the rapidly growing popularity of Internet technology, e-retail in rural areas
meets development opportunities. The growth rate of Internet users in rural areas is
far higher than that of urban Internet users. At the same time, significant regional
differences have took placed in China's online retail market. The data released by
Taobao.com shows that, ranking by order volume, the top five provinces of China's
online shopping market in May 2011 were as follows: Guangdong, Zhejiang,
Jiangsu, Shandong, and Fujian. From a national perspective, the higher online
shopping penetration areas concentrated on the eastern coast of the Yangtze River
Delta Economic Zone, and the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone and parts of
central and western economically developed central city the overall online retail
environment is better in these regions; followed by the Bohai Sea region and central
region, possibly in the future, they are areas of high growth; west is another potential
area for the development of the e-shopping market, including Shaanxi and Sichuan;
speed of e-retail market development in Northeast old industrial area gently.
In 2013, the transaction volume of Chinese e-retail industry is expected to more
than 1 trillion RMB. The coastal province alone is unable to meet the high demands.
Therefore, the second and third tier cities and even the central and western regions
and rural areas are large potential areas for e-retail development.

4 Research Findings

To systematically grasp and summarize the characteristics of the e-retail market, this
paper constructs radar chart of a comprehensive comparison of four indicators (see
Fig. 1 ).