China’s appetite for cinema is booming and is set to outpace the North American market by 2017.

Even more impressive is the country’s exponential rise in online movie ticket sales. Unlike other major markets around the world, the majority of tickets in China are sold online. So what’s the secret?

China is fast becoming a movie-going culture, and tickets are selling like never before. Instead of being sold at the theater, 80 percent of all movie tickets are bought online. Compare that to just 30 percent in the US.

China’s online ticketing success has a lot to do with cutting edge digital platforms that encompass the entire movie-going experience.

“The Chinese market has effectively combined what is Facebook, WhatsApp and E-wallet into a singular place and created an incredibly convenient and social way to buying tickets that’s integrated to payments, so that kind of convenience doesn’t exist in any other country that we work in and certainly doesn’t exist in the US,” Movio CEO and movie data researcher, William Palmer said.

WePiao is one of the largest online movie ticketing services in China. Developed by Weying Technology, WePiao offers customers discount tickets, social interaction, merchandise and even snacks at the concession stand.

According to Weying, last year, more than 720 million tickets were sold online, not bad for an industry that’s still in its infancy.

“If we divide by population, the average person goes to the cinema once a year, which is, for perspective, in the US, it’s 3.8 times a year, so we still see huge room to grow,” Weying Technology VP Luke Xiang said.

And helping fuel the growth is the explosion in third party online ticket retailers, which happen to be China’s biggest internet companies Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, one of Weying’s backers. U.S. Internet players like Google and Facebook are just starting to catch on.

(CCTV America’s May Lee contributes to the story)