Although the global economic downturn has affected both traditional and online retailers, analysts say the gloomy economic outlook is actually encouraging consumers to hunt for much cheaper goods on second-hand goods online like Amazon.com or make greater use of auction and rental Web sites.

“I like to shop for clothes online because no sales girls will pester me,” said Cecelia Wang, a 23-year-old university student in Taipei who said she spent about 1,500 Taiwan dollars, about $43, each month on Internet purchases. “For online shopping, all I need to do is sit in my room and shop, which is great.”

Internet retailing is increasingly making its presence felt in Asia because telecommunications infrastructure has improved and payment, a major obstacle to online shopping, is increasingly secure, analysts say.

As more people in countries like China and India get hooked up to the Internet, online sales are expected to rise by an average of 20 percent a year. In some markets, including Japan, they are expected to increase by as much as 40 percent annually.

“There is a huge opportunity for retailers in Asia-Pacific to benefit from the cost-savings of operating online,” said Sandra Hanchard, a senior analyst at Hitwise, an “online intelligence service” subsidiary of Experian Group.

“Surfing the Internet is now a mainstream lifestyle activity,” Hanchard said. “More and more traditional retailers are realizing that this is an opportunity to connect directly with consumers.”

Original US eCommerce sites like are among the most popular sites in Asia. Why? If you take a look on then you understand how eBay is integrating their multinational look & fool with special local Indian products, needs and services. Of course this has been done mainly by the more than two million registered users, which top purchases in 2008 included gemstones, mobile handsets, MP3 players, women’s apparel and Indian stamps and coins.

The market research firm Euromonitor forecasts that Internet retail sales in the Asia-Pacific region will have doubled in 2012 from 2007, reaching more than $71 billion by 2012.

Asia still lags behind the United States, where Forrester Research says that online spending in 2008 was $141 billion and could reach $156 billion this year.

In the United States, online sales at retailers like Best Buy and Macy’s continue to grow despite the recession and weaker physical store sales.

Hanchard says that online retailing in the Asia-Pacific region has been slow to develop, compared with its use in Europe and the United States, partly because retailers have not put as much money into their online channels.

What is interesting, say analysts at KPMG, is that the online retail sales market is expanding in more mature markets, including Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. These are countries that possess some of the world’s most effective communication services and high penetration for broadband Internet access.

In Taiwan, online shopping transactions rose 32.3 percent to 243 billion dollars last year, the Institute for Information Industry said, with most online shoppers buying clothes, accessories, beauty and health products. A Visa e-Commerce Tracking survey of 3,000 Internet users in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong found that the average amount of spending online in a 12-month period ending in April 2008 was $3,000.

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