A female host promotes her products via livestreaming in Yiwu. [Photo/zjol.com.cn]

Yiwu in Zhejiang province saw its online retail sales rise 3.9 percent year-on-year to 227.23 billion yuan ($33.54 billion) in 2022, ranking first in the province, according to local media outlets.

Yiwu is an important hub for Chinese manufacturers and global small commodity consumption. The city has led in terms of annual online retail sales every year since 2017.

The city has implemented various measures to help local merchants receive more orders on online e-commerce platforms amid the epidemic while carrying out epidemic prevention and control measures.

Yiwu is now home to 222 "Taobao villages", with 25 new ones listed in 2022, making the city home to the largest cluster of e-commerce villages in the country, according to AliResearch, a think tank owned by Alibaba Group.

A Taobao village is an administrative village (excluding neighborhood committees) with annual e-commerce sales of at least 10 million yuan. The number of active online stores in a Taobao village should be at least 100 or account for over 10 percent of total households.

Officials said that Yiwu is the most active area for rural e-commerce operators and online stores in Zhejiang province. To date, Yiwu has built 496 rural e-commerce service stations, and all residents in the city now have access to rural e-commerce services.

As an e-commerce hub of East China, the online retail sales of Zhejiang province in the period reached 2.7 trillion yuan, up 7.2 percent from the same period last year, data from the provincial department of commerce showed.