New | Top 5 business-to-consumer e-commerce platforms in China

One of the things that struck me most when I relocated from Hong Kong to Beijing two years ago was that almost everyone shopped online. I remember the disbelief and contempt on a friend's face when, not long after my arrival, I said I was walking to a supermarket 15 minutes away in order to lug gallon bottles of water back home. That was my first realisation of why delivery vehicles fill Beijing's lengthy streets.

Online shopping reached a record 2.8 trillion yuan in mainland China in 2014, making up around 10 per cent of total retail sales of consumer goods, according to official data. Business-to-consumer retail made up about 46 per cent of the online shopping market, a five percentage point rise from 2013. SCMP reporters have sized up the growing market and compiled a list of retailers based on market share.

Tmall

The B2C arm of Alibaba Group's e-commerce kingdom was spun off in 2008 from Taobao, which then became a consumer-to-consumer business (though many small shops and businesses still use the site to sell goods). The rationale was that having thousands of similar products on a similar platform would damage the user experience and merchant profitability, so the divison was made between large brands and smaller ones. The invite-only platform features more than 70,000 international and domestic brands from more than 50,000 merchants. Tmall controls about 60 per cent of the Chinese B2C market.