Sales at Xiu.com, a Chinese retailer of fashion apparel, jewelry and accessories like handbags, are up threefold so far this year, the retailer says in its 2012 “interim sales performance” report.

“Our sales performance has proven to the world that e-commerce is indeed an effective way to reach Chinese consumers with high purchasing power,” Xiu CEO George Ji says. More specific information about sales volume or the actual period for which Xiu’s sales have tripled was not readily available.

The online retailer notes that 80% of its sales are driven by demand for high-end imported products such as Burberry apparel, Cartier watches and Gucci handbags—all items currently for sale on Xiu.com. The retailer says it sells more than 200,000 product SKUs from 400 imported brands.

Xiu also notes that e-commerce continues to emerge as an effective way to sell to consumers across China’s 661 cities and 34 provinces, without having to build physical stores across the vast and populous nation. And the Chinese e-commerce market will only get stronger, Xiu says, citing demographic figures from the China Internet Network Information Center and studies by business consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers and Boston Consulting Group. Among 513 million Internet users in China last year, 194 million shopped online, an increase of 20.8% over 2010, according to a report on the China Internet Network Information Center’s web site.

A report released last December by PricewaterhouseCoopers on global multichannel shopping noted that Chinese consumers shop online four times more frequently than Europeans and twice as often as American and British consumers.

All this will result in online sales in China tripling to more than $360 billion by 2015, according to a Boston Consulting study.