Will they buy online?Yesterday, Metafocus held a joint breakfast seminar with Nottingham City Council and the East Midlands China Business Bureau. See our Nottingham blog for pictures and details of the seminar!
A few interesting points were raised about the Internet market in China, with questions about the development of China's "web 2.0" and the state of Chinese search engine marketing. In particular, many people were curious about people buying online in China.
When I was first thinking about the scope for e-commerce in China, I was apprehensive about Chinese people buying online. This was partly because my experience of Chinese business involved the building of trust and meeting business partners face to face was an obligatory step before anything business began.
On the other hand, the sheer number of forum users in China also reinforces the fact that many people do care about what they buy and who they buy from whether it is online or offline. Forums are the perfect way to communicate and share reviews on certain products or services, and it is predicted that about 80% of all Chinese sites run their own forum or "BBS" (Bulletin Board System) with an average of 10 million posts published daily.
The Internet is changing the world though and increasingly as the banks in China begin issuing more credit cards to the population, the combined curiosity of the Chinese youth to exercise their purchase power online will only continue to fuel what would soon be yet another very large part of the Chinese economy.
