On November 16th, CNNIC published "China Statistical Survey Report on Popular Internet Issues, 2004" in Beijing. The report contains two parts, including surveys on Email and online shopping. According to the data from the survey, it can be seen that the development of both Email and online shopping has greatly progressed and that there is still big room for further improvement in the market. The terms "Email" and "Online Shopping" have been closely linked with our lives, work and study, which used to be pretty new to us.

    The report shows that 96.5% of the respondents have free email accounts, 8% of the interviewees have charged email accounts. In the recent three months, 33.8% of those who had had email accounts before have applied new email accounts, 97.4% of which are free of charge; 34% of them applied new email accounts for convenience, while 25% did so because of the increase of the email account capacity, indicating that the users' demands for the use and capacity of email accounts increase as the improvement of Network speed and bandwidths. It is also reported that the additional functions of email mostly used are flash greeting cards, spam email filters and email remainders, with the percentages of 36.9%, 36.6% and 28.7% respectively. In addition, email users are fond of functions such as virus scanning, customized message, ringtone downloading and the sending/receiving of multimedia files. All of these show that as the enhancement of the Internet technology and infrastructure, people are no longer just satisfied with the email receiving and sending. They are more concerned with the additional functions email could offer. Users' requirements lead the market, email accounts with larger capacity and multifunction will be surely attracting more users. However, the issue of spam emails must be solved urgently, no matter whether the email accounts are free or charged.

    For the online shopping part, 17.9% of the Internet users have ever used online shopping service in the recent 6 months. Among them, 53.9% think of the door-to-door delivery by online shopping as a convenient way to do shopping and 50.1% believe the prices for the goods from online shopping are cheaper, 44.8% think they can buy things they cannot get from local shops, thus, indicating that as a newly emerged business mode, online shopping is taking the advantage of cheaper prices, convenience and diversity of goods, compared with traditional shopping methods. As far as the payment methods are concerned, it is reported that the percentages of different payment methods such as remittance, online payment and payment on delivery are 43.2%, 42.8% and 34.7%, showing that the electronic payment system has been greatly improved in China. However, due to the profits shared between the seller and the banks, the issue of making online payments using bank cards is yet to be solved out. As such, the cash flow is still one of the problems for online shopping. The positive competitiveness is the root cause for the improvement and progress of any industry. The competitions between banks have introduced better services for their clients. Once the bank cards issue is solved out, we will see considerable increases on the transactions and the volumes of trade from online shopping, consequently, facilitate the expansion of online shopping.
The director of CNNIC, Mr. Mao Wei indicated that this report was very helpful for us to thoroughly understand the current development of email and online shopping in China and to provide relevant organizations with referential data. He also pointed out that the problems related to these two Internet services reflected by the survey report would also be valuable to facilitate the establishment of specialized policies and regulations, help with the healthy development of applications of these two services and the availability of better Internet services to the Internet users.