Rural e-commerce extends to production areas

According to the 2014 County and Rural E-commerce data released by Alibaba, online store sales in poor counties across the country exceeded 12 billion yuan on Alibaba's retail platform in 2014, up 58 percent from a year earlier. The number of poor counties with online store sales exceeding 100 million yuan increased from 11 in 2013 to 21 in 2014. The effect of "poverty alleviation through e-commerce" is beginning to show.

According to Alibaba, there were more than 300 Taobao counties with 100 million yuan in 2014, covering 25 provinces (autonomous regions and cities), of which more than 100 million yuan Taobao counties came from the central and western regions, while 21 state-level poverty counties became 100 million yuan Taobao counties. For example, Pixian in Sichuan, martial arts in Shaanxi, Korla in Xinjiang and so on.

Prior to this, JD.com has also planned to open 500 county-level service centers this year to accelerate the market layout in 3-6 cities, districts and counties to rural areas. The "spark pilot" plan released a few days ago will gradually improve the rural distribution system, recruit rural cooperation points, support e-commerce platforms and traditional trading enterprises, and establish "JD.com gang" service stores for large household appliances. SUNING Cloud Merchants also expects to build 10, 000 SUNING service stations within 5 years, covering 1 and 4 townships across the country.

Not long ago, e-commerce giants were racking their brains to break through the "last kilometer" in rural areas, but now rural e-commerce has shown a "blowout" development, what are the reasons behind it?

The first is the accelerated penetration of the Internet into rural areas. According to statistics from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as of March 2015, 93.5% of China's administrative villages had opened broadband. According to the guidelines issued by the State Council on increasing network speed and reducing fees, 14000 new administrative villages will have access to broadband this year, which will cover more than 95 percent of the country's administrative villages.

The infrastructure is in place and the farmers have money in their pockets. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2014, the per capita disposable income of urban residents was 28844 yuan, an increase of 6.8 percent in real terms over the previous year; and the per capita disposable income of rural residents was 10489 yuan, an increase of 9.2 percent in real terms over the previous year, and the growth rate was 2.4 percentage points higher than that of urban residents. According to Chinanews.com, the per capita disposable income of rural residents in 12 provinces, including Shanghai, Anhui and Hebei, exceeded the national level in the first half of 2015.

The increase in farmers' income has led to the improvement of consumption level. According to data from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), the number of rural Internet users reached 178 million in 2014, and the total rural online shopping market is estimated to reach more than 180 billion yuan. As of December 2014, the number of rural online shopping users was 77.14 million yuan, an increase of 22.29 million yuan over the previous year, with an annual growth rate of 40.6%. It is the fastest growing Internet application among rural Internet users.

It is worth noting that the development of e-commerce in rural areas is gradually expanding from the field of consumption to the field of production.

Tao Chuanjin, director of the Social Welfare Research Center of Beijing normal University, once said, "the essence of poverty is the lack of ability to enter the market, while the essence of poverty alleviation is to improve people's ability to enter the market." "helping the poor through e-commerce" brings valuable opportunities for these farmers to enter the market.

Since last year, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Commerce have begun to promote the demonstration plan of "e-commerce into rural areas". In 2015, the scope of comprehensive demonstration of e-commerce in rural areas expanded from 56 demonstration counties in 2014 to 200 demonstration counties. Among them, the central and western counties accounted for 82.5%, and the poor counties accounted for more than 43.5%. The central government plans to allocate 2 billion yuan of special funds for counterpart support, especially for the development of rural e-commerce in old revolutionary base areas such as southern Jiangxi, eastern Guizhou and northern Shaanxi. The use of funds is focused on the construction of county, township and village logistics distribution system, in order to cultivate the local rural e-commerce ecological environment. The promotion of national policy has become a strong guarantee for the development of rural e-commerce.

Liu Xifu, head of rural Taobao strategy of Alibaba Group, said that at present, rural e-commerce has made great progress in the field of consumption. However, for many years, it is still a big problem for farmers to get rich, such as the high cost of buying agricultural products, the difficulty of selling agricultural and sideline products, the lack of entrepreneurial channels, the difficulty of financing and the lack of guarantee of network consumption. In this regard, Alibaba has currently launched the Thousand County Ten Thousand Village Plan, investing 10 billion yuan in three to five years to set up 1000 county-level operation centers and 100000 village-level service stations nationwide. By breaking through the bottleneck of logistics and information flow, efforts should be made to bridge the gap between urban and rural areas, and the network of e-commerce will be covered to the counties of 1max 3 and the rural areas of 1max 6.

Li Heming, head of rural e-commerce strategy of JD.com Group, also said that JD.com will plan to launch the rural e-commerce 3F strategy, build logistics, marketing, finance, big data and other networks around this strategy, and promote the transformation and upgrading of "agriculture, rural areas and farmers" e-commerce.

The cooperation between major agricultural provinces and e-commerce giants is moving towards the field of depth.

Lu Weifeng, vice governor of Heilongjiang Province, said at the meeting that Heilongjiang will carry out strategic cooperation with Internet companies such as Taobao and Tencent. Within three years, we will organize 3000 agricultural cooperatives and green organic food enterprises, build 300 online sales points for farmers with sales exceeding 1 million, and build e-commerce clusters in line with the agricultural development of Heilongjiang Province.

Agricultural material professional service website has also started in the field of e-commerce. Jinnong Network uses computers, mobile phone APP, Wechat and other third-party platforms to create an 'agricultural Internet +' platform that collects information, online agricultural materials and agricultural products transactions, online loans, logistics tracking, customer service, and traceability of agricultural products. At present, it has attracted nearly 300000 agricultural manufacturers, more than 900000 registered users of farmers and 400 million visits a year. " Jinnong net president Shen Shengbing said.

After the gradual opening of the "last kilometer" and the construction of the logistics system, the development of rural e-commerce is also facing new problems. Wang Shujuan, the "bell-ringing girl" when Alibaba went public, once expressed the concern that "3000 yuan basic salary package could not recruit suitable talents in Qingchuan County, Sichuan Province", highlighting the scarcity of talents behind the rapid development of rural e-commerce. According to the "Micro report on County E-commerce talents Research" released by Ali in 2014, the demand for e-commerce talents by county online merchants will exceed 2 million in the next two years. Among them, the three most scarce talents are operation promotion, art design and data analysis.

In order to meet the talent challenge, various county e-commerce have used high salary and benefits, equity incentives, promotion training and other ways to retain talent. And Alibaba, JD.com and other e-commerce giants have also launched "rural Taobao partners", "both sides benefit" agricultural process and other models, in order to bridge the talent gap of rural e-commerce.