Spent time on the phone this AM with a super-smart early-stage investor friend in China. Interesting to hear about so much innovation around social shopping & new e-commerce models. There are two missing pieces of the ecosystem in the U.S. that is slowing this type of innovation.
The Chinese ecosystem has two things the U.S. doesn't - competitive-programable payments, and competitive programable-logistics. Startups in China can build upon the the core infrastructure pieces with an API call - cheap easy payments and same-day/next day delivery.
Starting with payments, both WeChat Pay & Alipay are sub-50 basis point highly available, broadly used 1-click payment alternatives. Despite presence of Paypal, Square, Stripe and others, most online payments eventually end-run through an expensive transaction on the CC rails.
Few US payments are truly 1-click, & Apple, Google, & FB have failed to create something akin to Alipay/WC Pay. Why? Because China (& many other countries) have gov't required fast payments from bank accounts. Our fed is eager to fix this problem, but ... federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pre…
... in the U.S. we have a problem with "regulatory capture." Big-banks & CC companies are fighting this intelligent move from the fed. They leverage their senators/congress reps whose pockets are lined from these same companies. You can find it on @OpenSecretsDC if you look.
If you want an example of a gov't dealing elegantly with the same problem, read all about the UK's implementation of "faster payments" in this wikipedia entry. It's very straightforward. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Pa…
Our second problem is that Amazon has built an unmatched same-day/next-day logistics service, and FedEx, UPS, and USPS haven't kept up. Shopify & Google are both aware of the issue but there are not easy answers (remember Shopping Express?).
In China, Alibaba and others invested heavily to make sure there were competitive-programable logistic alternatives. The attached picture is borrowed from a @GoldmanSachs research report from a few years back. It will give you a sense of what is missing here. 
If you start a company today you build on top of other stacks/technologies - things like the Iphone or AWS, or even base technology like Linux, ARM, etc. You take it for granted, but you are standing on those shoulders. We are missing two key shoulders for e-commerce innovation.
