CNNIC published "China Statistical Survey
Report on Popular Internet Issues, 2004"
November 16, 2004
On November 16th, CNNIC published "China Statistical Survey
Report on Popular Internet Issues, 2004" in Beijing. The
report contains two parts, including surveys on Email and online
shopping. According to the data from the survey, it can be seen
that the development of both Email and online shopping has greatly
progressed and that there is still big room for further improvement
in the market. The terms "Email" and "Online
Shopping" have been closely linked with our lives, work
and study, which used to be pretty new to us.
The report shows that 96.5% of the respondents have free email
accounts, 8% of the interviewees have charged email accounts.
In the recent three months, 33.8% of those who had had email
accounts before have applied new email accounts, 97.4% of which
are free of charge; 34% of them applied new email accounts for
convenience, while 25% did so because of the increase of the
email account capacity, indicating that the users' demands for
the use and capacity of email accounts increase as the improvement
of Network speed and bandwidths. It is also reported that the
additional functions of email mostly used are flash greeting
cards, spam email filters and email remainders, with the percentages
of 36.9%, 36.6% and 28.7% respectively. In addition, email users
are fond of functions such as virus scanning, customized message,
ringtone downloading and the sending/receiving of multimedia
files. All of these show that as the enhancement of the Internet
technology and infrastructure, people are no longer just satisfied
with the email receiving and sending. They are more concerned
with the additional functions email could offer. Users' requirements
lead the market, email accounts with larger capacity and multifunction
will be surely attracting more users. However, the issue of
spam emails must be solved urgently, no matter whether the email
accounts are free or charged.
For the online shopping part, 17.9% of the Internet users have
ever used online shopping service in the recent 6 months. Among
them, 53.9% think of the door-to-door delivery by online shopping
as a convenient way to do shopping and 50.1% believe the prices
for the goods from online shopping are cheaper, 44.8% think
they can buy things they cannot get from local shops, thus,
indicating that as a newly emerged business mode, online shopping
is taking the advantage of cheaper prices, convenience and diversity
of goods, compared with traditional shopping methods. As far
as the payment methods are concerned, it is reported that the
percentages of different payment methods such as remittance,
online payment and payment on delivery are 43.2%, 42.8% and
34.7%, showing that the electronic payment system has been greatly
improved in China. However, due to the profits shared between
the seller and the banks, the issue of making online payments
using bank cards is yet to be solved out. As such, the cash
flow is still one of the problems for online shopping. The positive
competitiveness is the root cause for the improvement and progress
of any industry. The competitions between banks have introduced
better services for their clients. Once the bank cards issue
is solved out, we will see considerable increases on the transactions
and the volumes of trade from online shopping, consequently,
facilitate the expansion of online shopping.
The director of CNNIC, Mr. Mao Wei indicated that this report
was very helpful for us to thoroughly understand the current
development of email and online shopping in China and to provide
relevant organizations with referential data. He also pointed
out that the problems related to these two Internet services
reflected by the survey report would also be valuable to facilitate
the establishment of specialized policies and regulations, help
with the healthy development of applications of these two services
and the availability of better Internet services to the Internet
users.
