A conservative estimate has put the total loss of Chinese online shoppers at around 149.15 billion yuan or 24.43 billion U.S. dollars in 2013.
These losses were mainly due to online scams, according to a study made by the Internet Society of China (ISC). Based on the ISC study, approximately 55 percent of the victims of online scams lost cash below 100 yuan and around 13.4 percent lost more than 600 yuan in paying for below-standard, defective or non-existent products. Online shopping was identified as the most risky transaction that Chinese consumers have engaged in last year.
Other swindling schemes were accomplished through SMS and malicious charging on prepaid mobile phone accounts. In terms of gadgets, mobile phones had the highest risks of being used in shadowy online transactions as compared to desktops and laptops. Many of the victims made transactions using their smartphones.
This findings do not come as a surprise considering the fact that 77 percent of China's netizens use smartphones to access the Internet. Data about the prevalence of online scams and other related information were released by ISC during the yearly Internet conference in Beijing. According to the vice president of ISC, Gao Xinmin, the population of Chinese netizens has reached 608 million as of September last year. This is around 45.4 percent of the total population of China.
The ICS report also indicated that online Chinese users have created more than 1.8 trillion yuan worth of retail sales in 2013. This is a about 8.5 percent of the total retail sales in China last year, totalling to 21.13 trillion.
Further growth in online retail sales is forecasted to increase to 3 trillion yuan by the year 2015. This would account for about 10 percent of the total shopping transactions in China. Many large online companies are also competing to get a significant share of the online pie.