The consumer habits reshaping global retail were built in the East — and most Western shoppers haven’t yet adopted them. NIQ report shows that brands still treating live, social, and quick commerce as “emerging” risk being left behind.
The center of gravity in global retail has shifted East. The formats now driving the fastest growth in global retail (live shopping, social commerce, and delivery in minutes) were pioneered and scaled in Asia, and most Western consumers have yet to adopt them. According to NIQ, a leading consumer intelligence company, in its global report The Commerce Revolution: Where East Meets West, the gap between East and West is still vast.
The future of retail is already here: China’s $900B live-commerce market is nearly the size of US e-commerce—while the West is still catching up.
The scale is already substantial. China’s live-commerce market alone was worth roughly $900 billion in 2025, approaching the size of the entire US e-commerce market, according to market data cited in the report.
Yet 68% of consumers in North America and 67% in Europe have never once bought a product through social media, and roughly two-thirds have never used quick commerce. As APAC races ahead, now accounting for nearly 55% of all global e-commerce, Western brands and retailers that keep treating these channels as experiments risk being left behind. And AI is accelerating the shift.
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The “must-know” numbers
- The East is the world’s e-shopping capital. APAC accounts for roughly 55% of global e-commerce revenue in 2025, and China’s live-commerce market — at approximately $900 billion — approaches the scale of the entire US e-commerce market. China’s social-commerce market alone is on track to reach $1.8 trillion by 2030, up from about $500 billion today (market figures and projection cited in the report).
- The West hasn’t fully adopted these behaviours. 67-68% of consumers across North America and Europe have never purchased through social media, and roughly two-thirds (~69% in North America, ~66% in Europe) have never used quick commerce, while 59% of APAC consumers already buy through social platforms.
- Quick commerce is a way of life in Asia. It now accounts for around 80% of FMCG online sales in India, while China’s ~10,000 dark stores enable 30-minutes-or-less delivery at national scale.
- The West’s counter-move retail media is scaling but still hard to measure. Global retail-media spend hit $184 billion in 2025 across 270+ networks (US projected at $107.6 billion in 2026), yet almost half of brands say their measurement is only somewhat effective, or not effective at all.
The story isn’t that two regions are drifting apart. It’s that they’re converging. Format-led behaviors from the East (live shopping, social commerce, ultra-fast delivery, super-apps) are increasingly running on the monetization and measurement rails built in the West. AI sits at the center of this shift, accelerating both sides: powering discovery in the East and pricing, targeting, and measurement in the West.
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For manufacturers and retailers, the shift is from managing channels to orchestrating systems: connecting data, media, and commerce into a single, continuously optimizing engine. The brands that treat live, social, and quick commerce as the main event, rather than “emerging” experiments, will define the next decade of growth.
“What’s happening in Asia isn’t a threat to Western retail, it’s a preview,” said Emilie Darolles, President Western Europe, NielsenIQ. “Live shopping, social commerce and instant delivery aren’t ’emerging’ channels; in Asia they’re simply how people shop, and European consumers are already moving the same way. The brands that lead the next decade will read the East as a roadmap and act on it now, while the opportunity is still wide open.”
