The Development and Status of Automobile E-Commerce in China

Although the hype surrounding the promise of electronic commerce seems all pervasive currently, there is an absence of research on automobile eCommerce, especially in developing countries, which covers wide-ranging issues beyond contextual imperatives. This paper tries to fill in the gap, by analyzing the impacts of eCommerce on automobile industry in China, and the factors of eCommerce adoption and development of automobile industry in China from internal, external and contextual perspectives, after describing the internet and ecommerce in china. From the situation of automobile ecommerce in China, the paper finds that the automobile industry in China, especially automobile sales, remains only superficially affected by the ecommerce. This is a big difference from the developed countries such as U.S. The paper also displays the important aspects to the development of automobile ecommerce in China such as infrastructure, role of the central government, serving the customer better, security, customer trust, delivery, and so on.