BEIJING - Due to lower prices and broader choices, Chinese netizens have been roaming shops online for weeks before the Spring Festival, or the lunar New Year. But for those who are still hesitating about what to buy, it would be best to visit a real store.

Recently, more of China's online retailers were forced to delay delivery of goods as express companies are severely shorthanded during the shopping season.

Online purchases have surged in recent weeks as people around the country are preparing to celebrate the Lunar New Year, which falls on February 3 this year, leaving the delivery sector running beyond capacity.

"Almost all the parcels we receive these days are from online orders" , Wang Xiaohong, customer service manager of the Beijing Division of Yuantong Express, told Xinhua.

Inclement weather in China' s Guizhou, Yunnan, Zhejiang provinces further stalled the slow traffic.

"Usually I can receive my goods from Taobao within three days, but now I have to wait for weeks" , complained Nini, who frequents online shops.

Click onto almost every store on Taobao.com, China's largest online retail site, and a notice is posted on the front-page saying ordered goods cannot be immediately sent out starting Jan 20, despite growing demand nationwide.

The dilemma comes as major private delivery companies, such as Yuantong and Shentong, decided last week to stop accepting new packages in some cities to ensure parcels in the already-full warehouses are delivered before the Spring Festival.

The phenomena underscored the fact that China's logistics sector is lagging far behind the country's booming e-commerce market, which has witnessed explosive growth in recent years.

China's online retail sales in 2010 doubled from 2009 to reach 513.1 billion yuan ($77.89 billion), as the number Chinese netizens grows, according to a report released by China's E-commerce Research Center.

Booming online sales come behind the backdrop that the number of people using the Internet in China rose to 457 million at the end of 2010, up 73.3 million from one year earlier, according to a report released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) last Wednesday.

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The number of people shopping online climbed the most compared to other online services, up 48.6 percent year-on-year, followed by people using e-banking and online payment services, up 48.2 percent and 45.8 percent, respectively, in 2010, according to the report.

Taobao.com, a Chinese-language website for online auctions and shopping founded by Alibaba Group, reported nearly 200 million registered members and more than 200 billion yuan in annual turnover, creating at least 1 million online sales related jobs.

As China's inflation data remains high, the e-market will attract more price-conscious customers from the country's 450 million Internet users and has yet to deliver more growth potential.

But the opportunity also brings a huge challenge to China's logistics sector, one of the largest barriers to e-commerce.

Chinese customers have long been grumbling about the delays and patchy quality in the delivery sector because the logistics companies.

To ease the bottleneck, Alibaba Group, China's e-commerce giant, unveiled its plan on Jan 19 to invest 20 billion to 30 billion yuan in the first step to set up a network of warehouses nationwide.

China's electronics-oriented B2C site, 360buy.com and the garment site Vancl.com, also stepped up efforts to construct warehouses in major cities.

"We hope 10 years from now, anyone placing an online order can receive their goods within eight hours," Ma Yun, chairman and chief executive of Alibaba, said.