Western companies that make the Internet and e-commerce their primary marketing tool will find huge consumer markets with unlimited potential in China and India.

That was part of the message from participants in the 2015 China India Insights Conference sponsored by the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB), Yale University's school of management and the Sheth Foundation and held in New York on Sept 17.

"In India, 50 percent of the consumers are under the age of 25, and China also has a huge population of young consumers," said marketing executive Doreen Wang, global head of BrandZ at Millward Brown. "These consumers do not shop at stores. They were born mobile and digital and demand access to products and services at anytime."

Baohong Sun, a professor of marketing and associate dean of global programs at CKGSB, said the Internet gives companies a prime opportunity to reach a large audience in China and India. E-commerce allows a company to set up shop in China without the costs of a bricks-and-mortar store in the country, she said, "but established companies have been slow to react to the migration of Chinese consumers to online shopping."

Chinese shoppers prefer shopping on their smartphones and also prefer to pay for purchases using a service like Alipay from Alibaba or Tencent Holdings Ltd's WeChat messaging app mobile payment, Sun said.

"Western companies need to utilize payment platforms that Chinese consumers are comfortable with," she said. "US companies prefer credit cards, but Chinese consumers shy away from credit cards because there may be extra fees involved."

Chinese firms dominate e-commerce in the country, particularly among peer-to-peer business platforms like taxi-apps, according to Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University.

"Didi Kuaidi has 80 percent of the market to dwarf Uber in China and remember, it's the biggest ride-sharing market in the world," said Sundararajan.

"The Chinese firms are very well financed. Didi Kuaidi raised over $4 billion for just the Chinese market while Uber raised $7 billion for its entire global expansion."

paulwelitzkin@chinadailyusa.com