HANGZHOU, Dec. 30 (Greenpost) — China has witnessed a boom of rural e-commerce with 780 villages each having online shopping transactions exceeding 10 million yuan (1.5 million U.S. dollars) in 2015, according to a report released by Alibaba.

AliResearch, the research arm of the Alibaba Group, issued the report on Tuesday saying that this was a surge of 268 percent year on year.

E-commerce prosperous villages are called “Taobao villages,” as business is mainly conducted via Alibaba’s trading platform Taobao. In addition to the transaction volume, a Taobao village should have more than 100 businesses, or at least 10 percent of households involved in e-commerce, according to AliResearch.

The 780 Taobao villages are located in 17 Chinese provinces and regions with Zhejiang, Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces having the most.

AliResearch found that rural e-commerce business clusters are taking shape in these coastal regions, where Taobao villages are modernizing thanks to encouragement from their local governments.

This year also saw the emergence of rural e-commerce in the northeastern, mid- and western provinces and regions of Hunan, Yunnan, Jilin, Liaoning and Ningxia, where Taobao villages appeared for the first time. Among them, 176 Taobao villages are in impoverished regions. Enditem

Editor    Xuefei Chen Axelsson