China's rural e-commerce ushered in a new opportunity for development

Renmin Tingting in Anyue County, Sichuan Province, runs a decoration store with her husband in the county seat. Now she has become JD.com 's first batch of rural promoters in Anyue County. At the beginning of this year, the first batch of JD.com county-level service centers in southwest China opened in Anyue County and Yilong County. This is the first batch of self-operated county-level service physical stores in China's e-commerce, and Wen Tingting is the first single user of the service center.

It is understood that JD.com is setting up "county-level service centers" and other rural agents, which have now covered 5000 villages. JD.com aims to serve tens of thousands of villages this year, and plans to cover 80 per cent of Chinese villages in the next three years, of which villager agents need to find people who are familiar with the local area as agents.

Liu Qiangdong, founder and CEO of JD.com Group, recently returned to Suyu District, Suqian City, Jiangsu Province, to visit the "JD.com Service Center" in several villages to provide its strategic platform for "deeply ploughing the rural market and promoting rural e-commerce." This move is regarded by the industry as an important embodiment of JD.com 's rural e-commerce strategy.

On the other hand, Ali Group has launched the "Thousand Counties and Thousand villages Plan" rural strategy, and will invest 10 billion yuan in the next three to five years to establish 1000 county-level operation centers and 100000 village-level service stations. At present, "Village Amoy" has been stationed in 8 provinces, autonomous regions and cities across the country, covering 13 counties and 295 villages.

According to Ali's plan, the focus on the development of agriculture-related e-commerce business is "online goods to the countryside" for farmers and "agricultural products to cities" for urban consumers.

At present, e-commerce giants Alibaba, JD.com and other platforms are expanding everywhere in the field of rural e-commerce, and China's rural e-commerce has ushered in a new opportunity for development. At the 2015 annual meeting of the Boao Forum for Asia, many participants believed that 2015 may become the "enlightening year" of rural e-commerce in China, and rural e-commerce is about to usher in a new "tuyere".

"the logistics cost of rural e-commerce is relatively high, and we are taking model innovation." In an interview with Xinhua during the 2015 annual meeting of the Boao Forum for Asia, Liu Qiangdong said that rural e-commerce work is being vigorously promoted, and a logistics system is taking shape, or using local materials and existing means of transport in rural areas to reduce costs. Even rural walking tractors can also be included in the logistics system.

Liu Qiangdong believes that at present, the proportion of e-commerce in the whole rural area is still relatively small, and now the rural logistics cost is compensated by gradually reducing the cost of the city. When the system takes shape, the overall cost will come down.

Jin Jianhang, president of Alibaba Group, also said that Ali is also stepping up cooperation with express delivery companies with rural distribution capabilities to solve the "last kilometer" distribution problem as soon as possible.

Some experts have pointed out that rural e-commerce and new urbanization are a process that promotes each other. With the acceleration of urbanization in China, more consumption potential will be released. It is easy to strengthen the construction of information superhighway in small and medium-sized towns, improve the broadband frequency and access bandwidth of small and medium-sized towns and rural areas, improve the quality of the network, and speed up the popularization and application of the Internet, which will bring huge space for the development of rural e-commerce.

Because of the many advantages, e-commerce has tried the field of agricultural products one after another. Alibaba, for example, plans to invest 10 billion yuan in agricultural e-commerce over the next three to five years, a plan that is expected to cover 1000 counties in China.

Through the construction and operation of the e-commerce platform, agricultural products trading can not only achieve promotion, trading and customer service services on the Internet, but also complete market research through the use of big data, so that agricultural products management enterprises can better formulate their development goals. At the same time, through the rapid development of e-commerce, we can also develop finance, logistics and other industries related to the sale of agricultural products, and speed up the process of agricultural modernization.

Liu Qiangdong said that because of the commercial gap between urban and rural areas, the price in rural areas has been higher than that in urban areas in the past, and with the development of rural e-commerce, it will eventually balance this phenomenon and achieve fair consumption.

In addition, rural e-commerce also coincides with the entrepreneurship of college students returning home. With the popularity of the Internet and the development of logistics express, e-commerce can help the backward western regions to give full play to their resource advantages and achieve great-leap-forward development. In this process, the group of returning college students can give full play to their wisdom and strengths and make a difference in the spring tide of e-commerce entrepreneurship.