U.S. Leads in E-commerce Opportunity

An improving economy bolstered by rising consumer confidence helped the U.S. leapfrog over China and Japan as the most attractive market for e-commerce development. A.T. Kearney’s biennial Global Retail E-commerce Index places the U.S. at the top of the list with an attractiveness rating of 79.3, topping the 77.8 score of second-place China, the third-place finish of the U.K. (74.4) and the fourth-place finish of Japan (70.1). China topped the 2013 study, followed by Japan, the U.S. and the U.K. Countries are rated on the basis of the size of the market, consumer behavior, growth potential and infrastructure. “Although China’s economy has slowed down a bit, it’s still highly attractive,” said Hana Ben-Shabat, a partner at A.T. Kearney’s New York office and coauthor of the study. “But the potential for China is dependent on its infrastructure and, while that’s solid in the tier-one and tier-two cities that previously drove e-commerce development, it’s poor in many of the tier-three and tier-four cities where it will need to travel the ‘last mile’” in its e-commerce development. The lack of infrastructure is one of the main reasons that India, the world’s second most populous nation after China, didn’t even make the list of the top 30 e-commerce

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