Cross-border e-commerce hits fast lane

China's cross-border e-commerce sector has entered the fast lane as companies explore new growth areas and the government adjusts regulation, according to speakers of the China-Beijing E-commerce Conference.

The cross-border e-commerce value of Yiwu city, in East China's Zhejiang province, reached 35 billion yuan last year, double the amount the previous year, Chen Zhicheng, vice mayor of Yiwu, told the meeting in Beijing on Thursday.

The total deals value of e-commerce in Yiwu was 85.6 billion yuan, exceeding the deal value in the city's physical markets, which was less than 70 billion yuan.

Li Jinqi, director of the Department of E-commerce and Informatization, Ministry of Commerce, said more than 80 percent of Chinese traditional foreign trade companies have used e-commerce to develop overseas business.

Gui Lei, chief finance officer of eBay Shanghai, a subsidiary of the eBay Group, a global e-commerce platform, said foreign-trade companies-turned-online sellers have entered the advanced overseas storage model directly while small and medium-sized sellers such as college students and early-stage entrepreneurs tend to start small by conducting cross-border retail.

Gui said eBay, which started to pay attention to cross-border e-commerce in 2006, has seen explosive growth but did not provide concrete data. Sectors of furniture, auto parts and fashion products have seen the most rapid growth as eBay has enhanced its ability to help sell products overseas by cooperating with a third-party company to change the off-line delivery model into an online one suitable for cross-border B2C (business to customers).

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