How to get through the rural e-commerce "last kilometer"

The countryside itself is vast and sparsely populated, scattered and difficult to collect and distribute goods. Building a perfect logistics system has become an important aspect for major e-commerce platforms and express delivery enterprises to compete for the rural market.

Through policies and measures, it is necessary to solve the things that individual e-commerce enterprises wanted to do but could not do well in the past, and break through the institutional and institutional obstacles to the development of agricultural e-commerce.

This year's "double 11", the first delivery of Ali's rural Taobao took place in Zhongyizi Village, Miyang Town, Maitreya City, Yunnan Province. The pressure cooker purchased by the villagers takes less than an hour and a half from placing an order to signing for it. When the buyer is still in sleep, the goods snapped up have been quietly sent by Cainiao network rural logistics partner Dongjun Logistics to the village Amoy service station at home.

With the upsurge of online shopping, "marching into the countryside" has become an important business strategy for e-commerce enterprises. Rural e-commerce began to become a new competitive place. According to the "double 11" data released by Alibaba in 2016, there are nearly 20, 000 rural Taobao sites in China, covering 425 counties, with 5 million villagers buying 11.5 million kinds of goods. Driven by the market, Ali, JD.com, SUNING and other large enterprises have entered the countryside, rural e-commerce is increasingly showing a "two super, more strong, a large" pattern.

Although rural e-commerce has ushered in unprecedented opportunities for development, the current relative backwardness of the logistics industry has become a major obstacle to the development of rural e-commerce. Hong Tao, director of the Institute of Business Economics at Beijing Industrial and Commercial University, said that some rural areas are remote, the development of the logistics industry is obviously lacking, fresh-keeping technology, storage capacity and distribution power are uneven, especially the cold chain logistics capacity is not enough.

The "last kilometer" problem has become a major difficulty before express delivery goes to the countryside and e-commerce sinks. At the same time, the reality of vast and sparsely populated rural areas, scattered distribution, difficult collection and distribution of goods and empty return journey is difficult to change in a short period of time. To this end, to create a sound logistics system has become an important aspect for major e-commerce platforms and express delivery enterprises to compete for the rural market.

How to get to the "last kilometer" of rural e-commerce? "more and more new farmers' expectation of logistics limitation has begun to move closer to the city." Xiong Jian, general manager of the rural business department of Cainiao Network, said that through big data's prediction, household appliances and agricultural tools that are more in line with the purchasing habits of rural areas will be sunk to the county warehouse ahead of time, which can reach 50% of the day and 100% of the day. The advance sinking of inventory supported by big data can help merchants respond to market demand faster and shorten the time of goods on the way.

Data show that at present, several leading domestic express delivery enterprises have completed more than 80% of the network coverage at the county level, and the four-tier service network has begun to take shape, laying the foundation for the next flashpoint of rural e-commerce in advance. In addition to the continuous increase in the number of private express outlets, China's postal service system is also constantly improving. In 2015, the number of universal postal service outlets nationwide reached 53000 and the number of village post stations reached 210000, with the overall realization of "township and village postal facilities".

In addition, many places across the country have also created new models and methods one after another, such as Zhejiang Suichang street model, Tianjin township post station model and so on, trying to solve the difficult problem of e-commerce entering the village. At the beginning of this year, a reporter from the Economic Daily learned during an interview in Suichang, Zhejiang Province that a "street network" model was very popular with farmers. In each village, relying on commercial shops or health centers to set up service sites, the service stations are equipped with computers free of charge, and cooperate with telecom operators to solve the Internet problem. At the same time, training part-time site attendants in each village, through the rebate model to allow young people to help villagers in the street online shopping.

"at the beginning of the model, there was no express delivery in most rural areas of Suichang." Pan Dongming, head of the Suichang online Store Association, said that in order to solve this problem, the online store association and relevant departments have jointly set up a logistics system from Suichang county to each village, with an order of 4 yuan per order, arriving in one day. Every day, the first thing the network staff do when they go to work is to register the express delivery to the network, and then inform the villagers to pick it up. Similarly, if the villagers have something to hand over, they only need to hand it over to the "street" network of the village.

How to promote the combination of "agricultural goods to cities" and "online goods to the countryside" in a wider range of rural areas? Wang Xiaobing, deputy director of the Market and Economic Information Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, said that policies and measures should be adopted to solve the problems that individual e-commerce enterprises wanted to do but could not do well in the past, and break through the institutional and institutional obstacles to the development of agricultural e-commerce. For example, rural logistics and distribution need to be promoted in the county as a whole in order to reduce costs. In addition, the long-awaited preferential support measures for land, electricity and power grid should also be landed as soon as possible.