TLDR: Asia-Pacific grows fast, while North America and Western Europe remain consistently strong.
While Congress has yet to make any substantial headway toward internet sales tax reform, ecommerce sales continue to surge. Indeed, eMarketer estimates that total business-to-consumer (B2C) digital commerce sales will grow to 1.471 trillion dollars this year, a 19.3 percent jump from last year. However, total B2C sales are forecast to continue to grow over the next four years but at a declining rate, falling back to just single-digit growth in 2018. Those are the global figures, though, and in America ecommerce growth is much stronger. Specifically, sales are expected to grow by 32.9 percent this year in North America and taper off to a still very fast 30.6 percent pace in 2018. The Asia-Pacific region is also seeing a lot of growth, helped by China’s emerging middle class. More from the report, “Previously, eMarketer forecast that Asia-Pacific would surpass North America in market share this year, but full-year data showed China’s B2C ecommerce growth slowing faster than expected due to the market maturing. With China accounting for a significant portion of ecommerce sales in Asia-Pacific, this affected our estimates materially. eMarketer now expects Asia-Pacific to become the leading region for ecommerce sales in 2015, representing 33.4% of the total, compared with 31.7% in North America and 24.6% Western Europe. These three regions combined will continue to take around 90% of the global ecommerce market throughout our forecast period. The increase of ecommerce sales in Asia-Pacific is tied to a growing base of digital buyers, and as more new buyers come online, naturally sales will rise. However, by the end of our forecast period, nearly 70% of internet users in both Western Europe and North America will purchase items on digital devices, vs. just over 50% in Asia-Pacific…”
