The commerce bureau of Qingdao, Shandong province recently announced several dozen new ideas for increasing demand home and abroad to ensure continued development in the coastal city, including administration improvements, greater trade and investment, and getting some innovative tips from the Shanghai Free Trade Zone and other parts of China.

The city has set up a fund as a guarantee against financing risks in the supply chain of its small to mid-sized enterprises, and, for the first time in its history, it is looking at overseas investment and trade cooperation and administrative reforms in foreign investment in its province-level or higher development zones.

The new moves also emphasize e-commerce and call for technology service providers and e-commerce incubators and, back in July, it came up with guidelines for e-commerce urban development, with the idea of increasing its e-commerce transactions to more than 500 billion yuan ($81.6 billion) by 2016 and even 1 trillion yuan, by 2020, with online retailing accounting for 12 percent of its total retail sales.

In the words of one local online retailer who supports the move, “’Without the development of e-commerce, we have no future, that’s our consensus.”