Research On Geographic Pattern Of China’s C2C E-commerce

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth of C2C E-commerce. As a typical example of C2C E-commerce in China, Taobao.com is the largest C2C E commerce website. Based on the data of Taobao.com, using GIS tools and methods of spatial econometrics, this paper studies the distribution of Taobao C2C online stores in355prefecture-level cities and31province-level regions. The distribution analysis is conducted through three different dimensions, which are spatial dimension, time dimension and structural dimension. According to the results, there tends to be a decreasing geographical distribution from the eastern coastal areas to inland areas. The C2C e-commerce in the eastern areas, especially the Yangtze River Delta with the center of Shanghai and Hangzhou and the Pearl River Delta with the center of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, is active, and the on-line shopping is well-developed economy. On the contrary, in the western areas, the C2C e-commerce is still in a very backward state except in some capital cities. The results also show a significant and positive spatial autocorrelation in the development of the C2C E-commerce. Even when per capita index is taken into consideration, the degree of spatial agglomeration is rather high. In addition, the result of the spatial regression analysis indicates that the development of C2C E-commerce is highly relevant to the economic development of a city or a province, and it promotes the development of the local logistics industry. Moreover, the development of C2C E-commerce is related to the trade and economic factors, logistics and transportation environment, education levels of the residents, as well as the level of technology development of the region.