At the beginning of this year, we were mentioning that 2012 is the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese Zodiac and its set to be a very successful year for international e-commerce. Now a couple of months later, a report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) announced that China’s Internet commerce market is expected to triple its value over the next three years reaching $360 billion.

Despite the floundering Euro-zone economy – the German ecommerce sector is in rude health. Germany currently has the largest online population in the EU - there were more than 50 million German Internet users in late 2010 and this year, the online trade in goods in Germany increased by about 17% to €21.48 billion. 2011 is the first year that revenue from e-commerce has broken the 20billion euro turnover mark and outstripped traditional mail order sales by 10%.