China's total mobile online retail transactions are expected to more than triple to 7.4 trillion yuan ($1.1 billion) by 2020 from around 2 trillion yuan last year, according to a latest study by research firm Mintel.
Meanwhile, China's total e-commerce transaction size is set to hit 9.7 trillion yuan by 2020, the "Pocket Power" white paper estimated yesterday.
Spending on overall online-to-offline (O2O) services in China is expected to more than triple to 4.2 trillion yuan from 2015 to 2020, with a significant amount of capital from Internet giants and venture capital firms pouring into new service models and tech startups.
"People will rely on their mobile phones for everything with mobile retailing and services expected to dominate the majority of the consumer economy," Mintel's report said.
"Mobile commerce has the potential of completely changing the relationship between consumers, brands and retailers," Matthew Crabbe, Mintel's director of research for Asia-Pacific, wrote in the report.
Social media is also gaining as a purchasing platform.
"The majority of millennium consumers are favoring recommendations from friends, family members or bloggers through social networks," Willy Kruh, KPMG's global chairman of consumer markets, told Shanghai Daily.
