Abstract: The recent years have witnessed a popularity of Internet and on-line shopping. With the improvement of the public’s awareness of shopping on line, and supported by the highly developed logistics and economic environment, the C2C e-commerce is developing rapidly in China. Based on the data of the online stores on the largest C2C e-commerce website, Taobao.com, by using methods of Quartile map, Cartogram map, Moran’s I index et al in GIS tools and spatial econometrics, this paper studies 354 prefecture-level cities and discusses the development of C2C Taobao online stores of China. The results show that the C2C e-commerce is highly relevant to the economic development of the city. And the well-developed economic environment and logistics industry have promoted the boom of C2C e-commerce. In addition, in China, there tends to be a decreasing geographical distribution from the eastern coastal areas to inland areas. The C2C e-commerce is active in eastern China, especially in the Yangtze River Delta with Shanghai and Hangzhou at the center and the Pearl River Delta with Guangzhou and Shenzhen at the center. And the on-line shopping has become a well-developed industry. On the contrary, in western China, the C2C e-commerce is still in a very backward state except in some capital cities. The spatial autocorrelation analysis on 354 cities shows that there is a significant and positive spatial autocorrelation in the development of C2C e-commerce of China. Even taking the per capita index into consideration, we believe the C2C e-commerce still has a fairly centralized distribution.

Key words: C2C e-commerce, China, Geographical distribution, GIS, Spatial autocorrelation, Taobao.com