While Homeplus, the second-largest hypermarket in South Korea, has entered corporate rehabilitation proceedings due to deteriorating business performance, online shopping transaction amounts have continued their upward trend for eight consecutive years.

According to the "January Online Shopping Trends" released by Statistics Korea on the 5th, the online shopping transaction amount in January was 21,867.4 billion won, an increase of 295.6 billion won (1.3%) compared to the previous year. This marks the eighth consecutive year of increase since January 2018, when Statistics Korea began compiling year-on-year statistics.

By product category, food services saw the largest increase with 529.9 billion won (18.2%), followed by agricultural, livestock, and fishery products with 272.8 billion won (22.6%), and food and beverages with 271.6 billion won (9.2%). The transaction amount composition ratio by product category was highest in food services (15.7%), food and beverages (14.8%), and travel and transportation services (13.1%).

By product range, the transaction amount of comprehensive malls decreased by 2.8% year-on-year to 12,448.5 billion won, while the transaction amount of specialized malls increased by 7.4% to 9,418.9 billion won.

By operating type, the transaction amount of online malls increased by 1.9% to 17,159.9 billion won, while the transaction amount of online-offline combined malls decreased by 0.7% to 4,707.6 billion won.

The proportion of online shopping product transaction amounts in the total retail sales amount in January reached 27.1%. The online shopping product transaction amount excludes transaction amounts of travel and transportation services, cultural and leisure services, usage coupon services, food services, and other services from the total online shopping transaction amount. This means that about 3 out of 10 products purchased by domestic consumers were traded on online platforms.

The proportion of mobile transactions in online shopping also expanded. The mobile transaction amount in January was 17,271.7 billion won, an increase of 955.8 billion won (5.9%) compared to the previous year. The proportion of mobile transaction amounts in the total transaction amount was 79%, an increase of 3.4% during the same period.

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