China's e-commerce development in the past decade

When China's largest online retailer Taobao.com was set up in 2003, only a handful of individual e-shops were trading online, mainly in second-hand goods.

The trading volume was less than 100 million yuan ($16.04 million). Since then, as more and more people are engaging in online trading, C2C and B2C businesses grew at an astounding pace in the following years.

By the first half of 2012, there were more than 83 million e-traders in China, and over 214 million e-consumers. It's estimated that e-commerce trading volume will exceed 1 trillion yuan this year, or more than $160 billion.

Meanwhile, the service sector within the E-business industry also boomed. By the end of 2011, there were over 150,000 enterprises providing services for e-business, with an annual income of about 120 billion yuan. Volume on the other hand is expected to hit more than 1 trillion yuan by 2015.