The Internet giant is still optimistic about the large-scale losses of agriculture-related e-commerce.

Recently, an acre of agricultural e-commerce has been frequently pushed to the forefront of public opinion because of the news that "the data is too beautiful and accused of fraud". It has been reported that 95% of the thousands of e-commerce for agricultural products across the country have lost money, which has aroused social misgivings about agriculture-related e-commerce. However, the major Internet giants and listed companies have rushed to the entrance of agricultural products trading. In the search for Chinese entrepreneurs (ID:xjbmaker) held by the Beijing News a few days ago, many investors and entrepreneurs also believe that agricultural trading will become the fourth round of e-commerce craze after books, clothing and 3C. Agriculture-related e-commerce is on the eve of the outbreak and will become the next venture capital outlet.

Why does agriculture-related e-commerce lose a lot of money on the one hand and attract a large number of investors and entrepreneurs on the other? What is happening in agriculture-related e-commerce?

Large area loss of agriculture-related e-commerce

In the fierce competition, some agricultural e-commerce has gone out of business. According to the reporter's incomplete statistics, those who have closed down recently are small peasant girls, Youcai net, Yi Wanjia, and so on, as well as Yonghui's "half the sky" that goes offline automatically. Under the background of the cold capital market, more and more players are out. Xu Xiaofeng, the founder of I Youtian, told the Beijing News that according to his observation, in Shanghai alone, more than a dozen agriculture-related e-commerce companies have died this year. Premium value for half a month ago posted an emergency notice that due to business adjustments will be closed on August 31, all the products on the page have been removed from the shelves.

Xu Xiaofeng said that agricultural e-commerce is a very difficult area, if he did not get financing, it will be very difficult for him to survive so far. Wang Xiang, founder of Amoy Technology, said that the added value of agricultural products is very low, but the costs of logistics and preservation are high, and in some cases even exceed the cost of goods. These are the problems that agriculture-related e-commerce needs to face.

In order to reduce wear and tear, agricultural products, especially fresh food, need cold chain transportation. Originally, Dai Shanhui, vice president of life, told reporters that at present, third-party logistics does not have the last kilometer cold chain transport capacity, vertical agriculture-related e-commerce can only choose self-built logistics. The cost of cold chain logistics is much higher than that of ordinary transportation.

According to the 2014-2015 China Agricultural products E-commerce Development report, there are nearly 4000 domestic agricultural products e-commerce, but only 1% profit, the other 7% huge loss, 88% slight loss, 4% flat. Is the crisis of agriculture-related e-commerce coming?

Internet giants and investors are still optimistic

With the frequent occurrence of recession information, agriculture-related e-commerce has attracted the attention of VC/PE investors and listed companies. Including JD.com, Alibaba, Longping Hi-Tech, Dabei Nong and other listed companies have also shown a strong interest in agriculture-related e-commerce, one after another horse enclosure, the layout of the Internet agricultural ecosystem.

Some agriculture-related e-commerce also frequently received high investment. Bulk products trading platform "Agricultural products Purchasing Network" recently announced that it has received tens of millions of round B financing led by China Science and Technology Investment and its Chairman.

Jin Chongren, a partner in Purun Investment, told the Beijing News that over the past decade, books, clothing and 3C fields have all achieved a high degree of e-commerce, but the degree of e-commerce in agriculture-related fields is still very low. According to statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture, the online trading volume of agricultural products exceeded 100 billion yuan in 2014, accounting for 3 percent of agricultural sales, which is lower than the average of 7.9 percent of online shopping for retail products.

With the entry of capital, more and more players are involved. According to the China Agricultural products E-commerce Development report 2014-2015, by the end of 2014, there were 31000 agriculture-related e-commerce in China, of which nearly 4000 were agriculture-related transactions.

Wang Wenlong, executive director of Junlian Capital, told reporters that there are no monopoly enterprises in the agriculture-related field, and the Internet giant has just begun to lay out. For startups, they are on the same starting line as the giants, and entrepreneurs still have room to tap dividends.

In 2015, the first document of the Central Committee proposed to support e-commerce, logistics, commerce, finance and other enterprises to participate in the construction of agriculture-related e-commerce platform, which once again gave a shot in the arm to the development of agriculture-related e-commerce.

Industry insiders said that with the help of capital, agriculture-related e-commerce is likely to become the next tuyere of venture capital after O2O and B2B.

"it is service and quality that win consumers."

Agriculture-related e-commerce has encountered a lot of difficulties, but at the same time, more entrepreneurs think they have found the crux of the problem.

Since 2014, with the influx of capital, in order to seize the market, agriculture-related e-commerce has launched a subsidy war, including one-yuan fruit, the first order free, the first order to send apples, and so on. In response, industry insiders said that subsidies can only bring short-term dividends to consumers, and it must be service and quality that win consumers in the future.

Originally, Dai Shanhui, vice president of life, believes that agriculture-related e-commerce has natural barriers and obstacles, the first is standardization, and the second is quality control. "unlike clothing, travel and other areas, low-price strategies can not play in agriculture-related fields. If the quality is not good, no matter how low the price is, no one will buy it."

Unlike industrial products, the degree of standardization of agricultural products is low. There are many kinds of agricultural products, including vegetables, fruits, seafood, river fresh, poultry, egg milk, cereals and so on. Each category has a more subdivided category, and there will be different pricing for different appearance, specifications and parts of the same product. For example, for a piece of pork, different parts have different prices. Wang Wenlong, executive director of Junlian Capital, told reporters.

Another difficulty is quality control. Dai Shanhui told reporters that the current situation of China's agriculture-related industries is small-scale production and big market. Upstream suppliers are generally small, unable to form large-scale, quality is difficult to guarantee, and the downstream market demand is very large.

Win-win between upstream and downstream is the future direction

Jin Chongren, an investment partner in Purun, told reporters that the advantage of agriculture-related e-commerce is that it directly connects the upstream and downstream of the supply chain, which not only benefits farmers, but also allows citizens to enjoy cheap and high-quality agricultural products.

Source control and direct intervention in the upstream supply side is the guarantee of the quality of agricultural products. In order to find high-quality agricultural products, the original life, one place, one taste, and fruit butler have all set up offline teams to find characteristic agricultural industrial parks throughout the country, and intervene in the way of planting and cultivation.

Allowing farmers to get real benefits is the greatest guarantee of food safety. Should have been so founder Liu Hongyan told reporters that in the previous model, farmers are the bottom link of the entire industrial chain, bearing the greatest risk, but the least bargaining power and voice. In order to ensure the maximum yield, farmers have to abuse chemical fertilizers and pesticides. He tried to guide and reward farmers through a preference mechanism to benefit from quality rather than yield.

Investor Wang Gongquan once said at the landing forum of "looking for Chinese founders" that the really good business model is a win-win situation for both upstream and downstream. These entrepreneurs in the agriculture-related e-commerce field are working in this direction.

According to the 2014-2015 China Agricultural products E-commerce Development report, there are nearly 4000 domestic agricultural products e-commerce, but only 1% profit, the other 7% huge loss, 88% slight loss, 4% flat.

Agriculture-related e-commerce has natural barriers and obstacles, the first is standardization, and the second is quality control. Different from clothing, travel and other areas, low-price strategy can not play in the agriculture-related field, if the quality is not good, no matter how low the price will not be bought.

-- Dai Shanhui, vice president of life

Founder: Xu Xiaofeng financing situation: has received millions of angel investment.

I have the key to agricultural products trading offline.

I have Tian founder Xu Xiaofeng, who used to work as the general manager of a certain industry department of Digital China. In 2012, because he wanted to be a farmer, he left Digital China, where he had worked for seven years, to contract 500 mu of land on Chongming Island to grow vegetables. After some hard work, the market of vegetables is not ideal, the price is too low to sell to the wholesale market, and there is no way to sell to Shang Chao. After discovering that the vegetable farmers around him are facing such a dilemma, Xu Xiaofeng simply started his own business and made a B2B trading platform for agricultural products to clear the obstacles for high-quality agricultural products to enter the supermarket.

On my farmland platform, farmers submit and fill in the categories, yields, and characteristics of their own agricultural products, and upload pictures. The platform is called "setting up a stall." At the same time, Shang Chao sends out the demand information on the platform, and then the system will match automatically. After the match is successful, I Youtian will invite the farmers to Shanghai for detailed negotiations and finally sign the contract.

At present, our cooperation supermarkets include 58 Carrefour stores in eastern China, as well as stores in Auchan and Metro all over the country. In the process of docking between the two sides, I have land does not charge, but after the agricultural products enter the merchant super, I have land will provide more detailed services, such as logistics, display, small-scale shopping guides for store staff, etc., to help increase product sales, and take 10% of the final settlement fee. The greater the sales, the higher the commission on my land.

Xu Xiaofeng told reporters that unlike 3C, clothing and other categories, agricultural products are non-standard products, and different qualities directly affect prices, so it is difficult to do a good job in simple online transactions, and more detailed operations are needed offline.

Xu Xiaofeng said that China's agricultural e-commerce is very difficult to do, mainly because the current situation of agriculture is too backward. Specifications, quality, scale, packaging, can not meet the requirements of supply, it is very hard to do. But he also said that in this case, only adhere to the model, do a good job of service, will set up industry barriers.

Founder: Liu Hongyan financing situation: self-raised 10 million

It should be. in order to trust "honestly growing rice."

Wuchang rice is famous for its high quality. Liu Hongyan just wanted to buy some for his children to eat, but after arriving at Wuchang, he found it very difficult to buy authentic Wuchang rice. "the annual output of Wuchang rice is 1 million tons, and the actual market circulation is more than 10 million tons. 90% of the Wuchang rice you buy in the market is mixed fake rice." Liu Hongyan told reporters.

This incident made Liu Hongyan make up her mind to start a business and grow her own rice. Since August 2014, he has organized 46 peasant households in the villages under the Wuchang, collected 1000 mu of land, provided money, materials and experts, and local farmers provided land and manpower, and finally he came to buy it. The rice is sold to families with children in the city.

The model is to order in reverse, to sell and fix production. Every year from November to April of the following year, consumers submit their requirements on a platform that should be like this. After April, farmers will be organized to sow seeds according to demand. When the rice is ripe in November, deliver the rice to consumers.

Liu Hongyan told reporters that for a long time, farmers have been at the low end of the agricultural industry chain, bearing the greatest risk, but have the least say. In order to increase production, we have to use a lot of pesticides and fertilizers, and what should have been done is to help farmers remove the greatest "risk burden", and then guide and reward farmers to benefit through quality rather than output.

The biggest difficulty is trust. Liu Hongyan said that frequent incidents of toxic food have made people very vigilant about food safety. Once they break their promises, no one will trust you any more. This makes him have to be careful with every step, and even pay a higher cost for it. For example, he signed a manual weeding agreement with farmers, for which he had to pay a cost of nearly 1,000 yuan per mu. In many places, this is almost equivalent to the output of an acre of land.

"if you grow rice honestly, someone will buy your rice for the rest of your life." Liu Hongyan told reporters.

Founder: Li Wenxian financing situation: tens of millions of RMB A round financing from Junlian Capital

The fruit housekeeper solves the pain point of fruit ripening.

Under the background that pears are generally unsalable this autumn, a company called "Fruit Housekeeping" has acquired 1600 mu of pear orchards in Dongliusangu Village, Xingtai, Hebei Province. The 40 tons of pears in this pear orchard will be shared by 200000 users of the fruit housekeeper.

Fruit Butler is a C2B model of fruit e-commerce platform. Founder Li Wenxian told reporters that the traditional supply chain logistics takes a long time, and the fruit will be picked before it is ripe and ripened in transit, so it is difficult for consumers to taste the real "tree-ripe" fruit. On the other hand, the two different ways of maturity are very different in taste.

The fruit butler happened to solve this pain point. It can be sold in two ways. Conventional fruit is sold on a cumulative basis. After placing an order, the consumer buys from the orchard according to the accumulated order, determines the production by sale, and directly connects the supplier and the consumer.

Seasonal fruit is pre-sold. Take Sichuan Hongxin kiwifruit as an example, according to the characteristics of short shelf life and ripening period, the fruit butler initiated pre-sale 10 days in advance, accumulating a single quantity of 100000 cases. After the kiwifruit trees are ripe, they will be picked from the trees and airlifted to Beijing, which is really "picking and eating."

The benefits of this model are obvious. Customized consumption patterns tend to form user stickiness, and the repurchase rate is very high (75%). The fruit butler adopts the way of community co-purchase and establishes a fruit circle based on the community. after the fruit friends accumulate orders, they are delivered to the community twice a week, reducing the average cost on each order.

Quality is the most important, and the source is the key. Before signing a contract with the orchard, they need to observe the whole fruit period and have an understanding of quality and growth. After signing the contract, there will be clear requirements for planting and cultivation methods, "for example, chemical fertilizers and pesticides cannot be used, and pests can be removed manually."

The fruit butler cut the logistics transfer link and cut the cost. More importantly, the price that farmers sell to fruit housekeepers is higher than before.

Founder: Liu Yong financing situation: millions of RMB angel investment

Let the market price be equal to the land price

The newly launched Hongyang kiwifruit in Pujiang has become a hot item on the "one place blindly" platform. Compared with the products on the market, the semi-wild growing environment makes the taste of Hongyang kiwifruit more natural and sweet.

All the products on the line come from different places, one place, one kind of delicacy. "for example, small bowls of brown sugar in Yunnan, Chinese native honey in Qinghai, and Maofeng in Huangshan." Founder Liu Yong told reporters that it took a lot of painstaking efforts to find these characteristic agricultural products. Take Hongyang kiwifruit as an example, the taste search group took Chengdu as the center and searched the surrounding villages for half a month.

Liu Yong, a former regional manager of Alibaba's 2B business, left his job in 2012 to start a business and got involved in the field of agricultural products trading. In early 2014, one place blindly went online and started the journey of "travel + food".

Different from B2C e-stores such as Shun Feng optimal selection, the positioning of "one place blindly" is a light mode trading platform, which does not involve logistics and warehousing, and the transaction process is similar to Taobao. After finding the characteristic agricultural products, they are blindly packaged into a brand and sold on the platform. After the user places the order, the farmers will use the third-party logistics to deliver the goods by themselves. Every product on the platform has been tested and selected by the taste group to ensure the quality.

A place blindly optimized the complex circulation links, the field of fresh agricultural products directly to the hands of consumers, can preserve the taste to the best. At the same time, due to saving the cost of logistics and warehousing, the product price can be reduced, or even make the market price equal to the land price.

The product type of "blindly in one place" is targeted at niche products in mass products, such as small bowls of brown sugar in Yunnan, with an annual output of only 5 tons. Liu Yong told reporters that it is difficult for minority agricultural products to enter urban large-scale sales channels. The blindly emergence of a place can not only help farmers solve sales problems, but also let urban users eat fresh agricultural products with national characteristics.

Founder: Wang Xiang financing: self-raised 5 million

Land scavenging technology turns farmers into workers with options

Wang Xiang is not a farmer, he is an experienced agricultural practitioner. After coming to Beijing from Inner Mongolia, he contracted 200 mu of land in Xiaotangshan to grow strawberries. But over the past three years, I have not made any profit. This makes him wonder whether there is room to grow strawberries in an entrepreneurial way if they can't make money from such a high value-added product.

Wang Xiang's experience in planting, transportation and marketing has made Wang Xiang have a better understanding of the upstream and downstream industrial chain of agriculture. In his view, traditional agriculture has fallen into trouble: the price of agricultural products is getting higher and higher, but the income of farmers has not increased accordingly; agricultural products have to go through four rounds from origin to table, resulting in an inevitable loss of up to 20%; there is an imbalance in supply and demand information, and unsalable sales occur repeatedly. In the face of these problems, he began to consider using the Internet to connect consumers and farmers, so that farmers have more income, less loss, and safer products. Amoy technology was born in this way.

In the planting season, cooperatives pack the land, agricultural products, output, quality and other contents into a product, which is sold on the Amoy technology platform. After consumers buy, the Amoy platform arranges farmers to plant and produce on demand. Taodi will install cameras, carbon dioxide detectors and other equipment in the cooperative greenhouse to dynamically monitor and control the growing environment of agricultural products, and consumers can see the process of growing fruits and vegetables in the greenhouse, making the products safe and traceable.

In this model, farmers no longer have to take any risks, and the more they harvest, the more they will earn, the equivalent of workers with options.

At present, Amoy technology is still in its infancy. A week later, Hongti and Xiaotangshan strawberries will be accepted online as the first batch of products.

The rural market is particularly large, and if the Internet can be used to solve the regional dilemma, there is much to be done. The really good business model is the win-win situation of both upstream and downstream. These entrepreneurs in the agriculture-related e-commerce field are working in this direction. Wang Gongquan, a well-known investor

The advantage of agriculture-related e-commerce is that it directly connects the upstream and downstream of the supply chain, which not only benefits farmers, but also allows citizens to enjoy cheap and high-quality agricultural products. -- Jin Chongren, partner of Purun Investment