The_Future_of_Global_Retail_Preview

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THE RISE OF CHINA’S E-COMMERCE A two-decade boom

The year 1999 was the last of the second millennium in the Christian Era, when much of the world was preoccupied with the supposedly menacing millennium bug. According to the Chinese zodiac, however, it was the Year of the Rabbit – a docile and harmless animal, or at least not one that suggests drama and upheaval. In the annals of China’s e-commerce, 1999 would, in fact, turn out to be a very significant year, which marked the births of a number of key internet firms that, in due course, would shape the landscape of online competition and impact the nation’s lifestyle for decades to come. In March 1999, Jack Ma founded a B2B e-commerce platform called Alibaba, in the city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. In August of that year, Shao Yibo, a Harvard Business School graduate, introduced eBay’s C2C model to China and established his own online trading community, Each- Net, in Shanghai. In November, Peking University graduate, Li Guoqing, followed Amazon’s B2C model to found e-commerce firm, Dangdang, and started selling books online. To put things in perspective, in 1999, eBay was

DOI: 10.4324/9781003205074-3