Year in Review 2025: China, APAC and WPIC's Breakout Growth

Jacob Cooke

Co-founder & CEO

Published on December 18, 2025

As 2025 wraps up, our front-row view of Asia-Pacific e-commerce has revealed a clear story: Chinese consumers remain resilient and adventurous in their spending, Asia-Pacific markets outside Greater China continue to grow rapidly, and WPIC itself has been busy investing in new capabilities and partnerships.

In China, solid domestic demand and AI tools propelled another record-breaking Singles’ Day and set the stage for 2026.

Across the rest of APAC, Japan and Korea have kept expanding in key categories, while Indo-Pacific’s e-commerce markets are maturing into multi-hundred-billion-dollar opportunities.

Alongside these market trends, WPIC was hard at work building out new platforms and facilities to support brands targeting Asia.

Overview:

China Trends

In China, the consumer-led recovery continued at pace.

The 618 Shopping Festival in June hit a new high of roughly US$119 billion in GMV – up about 15% year-on-year – signaling a confident, value-driven buyer.

These mid-year indicators carried through the second half: Singles’ Day 2025 set a new record of US$240 billion in sales, also up around 15% year-on-year. In plain terms, China’s consumers have continued spending despite global headwinds, prioritizing wellness and quality.

This shift shows up in what they bought. Across major festivals, products tied to health, fitness, and personal well-being dominated.

In WPIC’s first party data, we saw strong gains in health supplements, activewear, premium beauty and personal care, and child/baby/maternity goods. This means Chinese shoppers are swapping flashy status labels for products that promote health, confidence, and daily satisfaction – a shift we described as “Look Good, Feel Good.”

Premium lifestyle brands (not necessarily ultra-luxury) have become the new sweet spot, as consumers pay for quality and trust.

Technology has been a key enabler of these trends. On the merchant side, we saw broad deployment of artificial intelligence tools across 2025. Retailers and platforms used AI to support everything from dynamic pricing and ad targeting to inventory forecasting.

As I wrote in November, Alibaba’s latest earnings clearly show a major investment in AI: the company’s cloud revenue jumped 34% year-over-year, driven by enterprise AI services, and its consumer AI tools (like the new Qwen chatbot app) saw massive adoption. Alibaba itself put it bluntly: winning the future of e-commerce means “winning AI”.

On the consumer side, AI-powered features made shopping smarter – from AI assistants that answer voice queries to virtual try-on tools for apparel and cosmetics. These capabilities improved both conversion and customer satisfaction.

We saw that in our data as well. Our portfolio-wide data points confirmed that AI-led innovations contributed to a more efficient Singles’ Day, helping it deliver robust growth without the frantic pre-2020 price wars.

Instant retail – same- or next-hour delivery of everyday goods – is another technological shift we saw accelerate. In 2025, Taobao’s “Instant Commerce” reached over 60 million daily orders, with on-time delivery rates above 96%.

Non-food orders jumped 179% year-over-year as well, as Chinese consumers now expect lightning-fast service. In fact, Alibaba projects that instant commerce could add over US$140 billion in GMV over the next three years. Simply put, this means brands across health, beauty, wellness, and everyday CPG categories must consider local inventory and hyper-fast fulfillment if they want to stay competitive.

We’ve already had clients leverage WPIC’s logistics network and AI-driven inventory tools to meet this demand, underscoring how fulfillment speed is now a battleground for consumer mindshare.

The platform landscape also evolved across China. As we predicted for the past two years, content-driven commerce has grown even stronger. Integrations between social apps and marketplaces became seamless – for example, RedNote (a.k.a. Xiaohongshu) now lets users buy products directly from posts by jumping into Taobao/Tmall stores.

It’s clear that the path from inspiration to purchase is shortening. As I noted in May, Alibaba’s new partnership with Xiaohongshu creates an almost frictionless app-to-app checkout experience. In practice, shoppers can discover a product in a short-video or KOL post and complete the purchase in seconds, with the store owner able to track exactly which ads or posts drove each order. This trend is a game-changer for brand marketing in China: engagement metrics and performance dashboards now capture the full buyer journey, letting brands truly optimize ad spend and content strategy.

Overall, the big picture is clear: China’s consumer market remains a critical growth driver – especially for brands that align with its priorities. Demand for high-quality overseas products is resilient.

Chinese shoppers today are selective and value-conscious; they want innovative experiences that save them time and improve their lives. For international brands and investors, the takeaway is that the opportunity is still immense, but strategies must be data-driven, localised, nuanced to local tastes, and powered by AI to capture the market’s attention.

APAC Trends

Japan, the region’s second-largest e-commerce market, continued expanding at a healthy rate. Japan’s online sales grew 8.4% in 2024 (to ~US$192 billion) and are projected to grow another 7.7% in 2025 (reaching more than $207 billion in GMV). This makes Japan the world’s fourth-largest e-commerce market, supporting a highly digital consumer base. Domestic trends – high smartphone penetration, convenience stores as pickup points, and innovative payment methods – have helped to propel and sustain this growth.

South Korea remained APAC’s third-largest e-commerce market in 2025. According to our recent report on Korea, its total online GMV was approximately ₩300 trillion (~US$215 billion) in 2024, with expectations for high single-digit growth in 2025. That amounts to roughly one-third of all retail sales in Korea, underscoring e-commerce’s massive role in the market.

Korea’s growth trajectory is also strong – PCMI data shows the market could grow at ~13% CAGR through 2027. Moreover, our report highlights that Korea’s consumers are predominantly mobile-first and demand excellence in speed and service from brands and merchants.

For instance, Coupang’s “Rocket Delivery” sets consumer expectations for next-day or same-day delivery, forcing all brands to optimize their supply chains to meet that. Key high-growth categories in Korea also mirror global and local trends over the past year: health supplements, athletic/outdoor apparel, mother-and-baby products, pet products, and beauty/skincare all accelerated faster than the rest of the market.

Leading e-commerce platforms – chiefly Coupang (≈40% market share) and Naver Shopping (≈20%) – are investing in omnichannel features and AI-driven recommendations. Like in other parts of APAC and the rest of the world, social commerce and live shopping are also emerging, as younger Koreans blend entertainment with commerce on apps like TikTok and Kakao. For brands and investors, Korea represents a high-speed yet mature market: success requires both local expertise (e.g. language-and-interest-specific marketing) combined with robust logistics to meet these discerning consumers.

Further south, South-East Asia continued its double-digit growth trend. The region’s total internet economy (e-commerce plus digital services) is forecasted to jump to over $330 billion USD in 2025.

Indonesia leads by a wide margin, followed by Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Importantly, forecasts show SEA’s e-commerce GMV will more than double in countries like Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines by 2030. In practical terms, mobile-driven shopping is now mainstream across SEA, and the young population keeps expanding the market. For instance, local digital giants Shopee and Lazada are rolling out features like tiered membership programs and faster cross-border shipping to capture more of these sales.

Japan’s $200+ billion market, Korea’s $200+ billion market, and SEA’s $300+ billion market are all significant on their own and even more so, when combined as part of a continental strategy. In all these markets, a few themes stand out: mobile-first consumer behavior, rising middle-class demand for quality, and a surge in digital payment and loyalty programs. In 2025, we helped many global brands take advantage of these trends by launching localized D2C stores for these marketplaces.

In summary, 2025 reinforced that Asia’s e-commerce boom is multi-faceted. China leads with sheer scale and cutting-edge tech (AI assistants, instant delivery, livestream shopping, etc.), but Japan and Korea offer mature infrastructures and big opportunities in health/lifestyle categories, and SEA continues to expand rapidly with its mobile-savvy consumers.

Brands and investors should remember that growth can look very different country by country: winning in APAC means choosing the right platforms, categories, and strategies for each market, and leveraging data to stay agile across the region.

In every case, a well-tuned analytics engine (like our new WPIC Commerce Intelligence) is a critical tool for turning these regional trends into real business growth.

WPIC Developments in 2025

Besides the market growth we saw in Asia, this year WPIC continued to invest aggressively in new services, infrastructure, and talent – all aimed at helping global brands capitalize on the trends above.

Key milestones included:

WPIC Commerce Intelligence (Q4 2025)

In Q4, we publicly launched WPIC Commerce Intelligence, a major upgrade to our flagship data platform. This AI-enhanced dashboard now consolidates omnichannel sales, inventory, and even social media metrics into one view for brands. For example, it can instantly answer questions like “which SKUs ran out of stock on which platform last week, and how did that impact sales?” using natural language. By unifying platforms (Tmall, JD, Shopee, Lazada, Rakuten, TikTok/Douyin, etc.) and adding predictive analytics, the tool gives brands, marketers, and supply chain teams unprecedented visibility to make faster decisions. It’s already being adopted by hundreds of clients looking to shorten their decision cycles in APAC.

Expanded Logistics & Fulfillment

In 2025 we significantly grew our logistics footprint. In January we opened a new 40,000 sq. ft. Narita, Japan warehouse near Tokyo’s Narita Airport. This AI-powered facility improves import lead times and inventory turnover for our clients’ Japanese operations.

In November, we cut the ribbon on a 600,000 sq. ft. Nanjing, China hub. Equipped with AI-enabled inventory management and multiple cold-storage rooms, the Nanjing center (adjacent to Jiangbei Port) is now one of the most advanced e-commerce warehouses in China. It features a fast-picking zone for hot items, plus high-rise racks for long-tail stock – all designed to guarantee 1-hour delivery where needed.

These investments give our brand partners a strategic edge: faster delivery and lower fulfillment cost across Asia, backed by WPIC’s integrated “storage to dispatch” system.

New Offices and Partnerships

Reflecting our roots and global focus, WPIC invested in people and presence.

We cut the ribbon on a new Beijing office (Huamao Center) in April, just across the street from where the company began 20 years ago. In an opening ceremony, I shared how proud we are to keep expanding in China’s capital and thanked local partners for their support

Finally, in October, I co-hosted the China Crossborder Summit in Santa Monica with Tmall Global. This invite-only summit brought together senior U.S. brand leaders and experts to discuss China’s e-commerce environment. On stage, I emphasized that crossborder e-commerce is the most effective route to enter the Chinese market and that consumer demand for high-quality U.S. products remains resilient. The event was a resounding success and will expand to more cities next year.

Leadership Appointments

To drive our next phase of growth, we also strengthened the WPIC executive team.

In October, Peter McMath was appointed Chief Growth Officer, leading our global partnerships and business development efforts. Peter has been instrumental in expanding WPIC’s international client portfolio and will now focus on forging new channels into APAC. And in December, Charles Lavoie was promoted to Chief Revenue Officer, overseeing our global marketing and revenue strategy. Charles’s blend of creative vision and analytical rigor will help align WPIC’s branding and performance goals to maximize client success. These additions underscore our commitment to world-class leadership as WPIC scales.

Each of these developments reflects our two-pronged focus: deepening capabilities for our brand clients, and proving value for all of our stakeholders.

The WPIC Commerce Intelligence platform and new warehouses, for example, directly help brands optimize inventory, fulfillment, and marketing performance. Meanwhile, co-hosting industry events and expanding our leadership team signal WPIC’s strength and stability to investors watching the Asia e-commerce space. Together, these initiatives mean that in 2025 we’ve built even more bridges between insights and execution in APAC commerce.

Looking Ahead

If 2025 was about proven resilience and strategic investment, the road into 2026 is wide open. China’s consumers are back, Japan’s shoppers are steady, Korea’s buyers are sophisticated, and SEA’s growth engines are revving up.

At WPIC, we’ll be doubling down on the AI and analytics that help brands navigate this complexity. To our current and future clients and partners: thank you for your trust this year, and get ready – Asia’s digital commerce landscape is only speeding up.

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