A new survey conducted by One Hour Translation, the world's largest online translation agency, in collaboration with Google Consumer Surveys, has found that the rate of U.S. citizens doing online shopping on Chinese websites is surprisingly low. Only 15% of the U.S. consumers participating in the survey reported they had purchased a product or products from Chinese websites during the last year.

The U.S. survey was part of a larger one conducted in April of 2016. The survey examined a representative sampling of 2,100 respondents from 9 countries; 500 people from the U.S. and 200 from each of the following eight countries: U.K., Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Spain, Japan and Brazil. The survey question posed, and presented in the chief language of each of the 9 countries, was: "Have you purchased any products from a Chinese website in the last year?"

16% of the Canadian consumers reported buying from a Chinese e-commerce site during the last year. In Europe, 11% of U.K. consumers purchased from Chinese websites, compared with 12% in Germany, 15% in France, and a relatively high rate in Spain of 28%. 17% of Brazilian consumers reported they had purchased from a Chinese site, compared with 23% of Australians and a very low rate in Japan of 4%.

An average of 15.5% of all respondents, in the countries surveyed, purchased from Chinese websites, while 84.5% said they had not.

"Our findings show that Chinese e-commerce sites are just beginning to take advantage of the U.S. market," said Yaron Kaufman, Co-Founder and CMO of One Hour Translation. "Chinese web marketers should find effective ways to localize their websites and the marketing campaigns that accompany them in order to leverage the opportunity of gaining market-share in the U.S. and around the world fully. It is clear from the surveys conducted by research companies like Common Sense Advisory, as well as One Hour Translation’s own surveys, that consumers around the world prefer shopping in their own language."

(Source: Furniture World Magazine)