Imagine ordering from Amazon – in the Amazon? While one-click shopping from deep inside the rainforest sounds a bit farfetched, it may not be for long. The percentage of people shopping online from emerging markets such as Brazil, China and India more than doubled between 2011 and 2016, to 31 percent last year, according to a new report out from Credit Suisse Research based on face-to-face interviews with 14,000 people. Based on current growth rates, the report projects the e- commerce market in the eight countries it studied to grow from $1 trillion in 2016 to $2.5 trillion in 2025.
Those numbers hinge in large part on the rapid spread of Internet access to all corners of the world. In Brazil, for example, 91 percent of those interviewed for the report had internet access, up from 84 percent last year and 56 percent in 2010. China, Russia and Turkey also reported better than 80 percent of the adult population having access to the internet. The country with the lowest penetration rate was Indonesia at 51 percent, a proportion which has more than tripled since 2010.