Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) recently reported the EC market trend in Japan and comparison of cross-boarder EC markets among Japan, U.S. and China. According to the report, the EC market scale in Japan expanded by 9.9% year on year to 15.1 trillion JPY in 2016, and the ratio of the BtoC-EC market accounted for 5.43% of the total commercial transactions, 0.68 higher points than 2015.
The table below shows changes of the BtoC EC market scale in the past seven years:
By category, EC transactions were up 10.6% to 8,004 billion JPY for product sales, up 9.2% to 5,353 billion JPY in the service-related businesses and up 8.9% to 1,778 billion JPY in the digital ?related services. Among the service-related businesses, EC transactions on travel service were up 5.4% to 3,039 billion JPY, and the large growth was found in beauty care service with transactions of 326 billion JPY (+34.7%).
The table below shows BtoC EC market scales in the service-related businesses:
METI analyzed that the growth of EC transactions on travel services resulted from higher penetration of OTA and online bookings on major travel companies into consumers and an increase in direct online bookings of air tickets. METI also said that consumers benefit easier search and booking and smoother boarding with e-tickets.
The BtoC EC market scale on smart phones was up 28.7% year on year to 2,556 billion JPY, which accounted for 31.9% of the entire EC market. The table below shows the EC market scale on smart phones:
In the cross-boarder EC market, shopping of goods of Japanese merchants by Chinese and U.S. consumers amounted to 1,652 billion JPY (+23.9%), which consisted of 1,037 billion JPY (+30.3%) by China and 615.6 billion JPY (+14.4%) by U.S.
Shopping of goods of merchants in China and U.S. by Japanese consumers amounted to 239.6 billion JPY (+7.5%), which consisted of 217 billion JPY from U.S. and 22.6 million JPY from China.
