Can a network cable really connect urban and rural areas?

"if you want to live a good life, go to Taobao quickly," according to the Ministry of Commerce. In the first half of this year, online retail sales in rural areas exceeded 310 billion yuan, while online retail sales of agricultural products nationwide reached more than 56 billion yuan. In the face of this potential market, rural e-commerce has become a new tuyere pursued by many entrepreneurs.

Recently, at the National "Internet +" Modern Agricultural work Conference and New Farmers' Entrepreneurship and Innovation Conference held in Suzhou, Minister of Agriculture Han Changfu pointed out that one of the breakthroughs in promoting "Internet +" modern agriculture is to promote agricultural e-commerce. let good products sell at a good price.

However, when the Internet collides with agriculture, the most traditional industry, which stimulates the spark of innovation, it also faces a lot of problems. How can entrepreneurs who stand in the tuyere fly higher in the wind?

What is the difference between the completion of the online store?

The "difficulty in selling" has been alleviated, but there are still pain points such as logistics.

Liu Chuanjun, who graduated from the space physics major of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, did not continue to look up at the starry sky, but chose to face the loess and embarked on the entrepreneurial road of agricultural products e-commerce without hesitation.

Determination stems from a deep affection for the countryside. Liu Chuanjun, who grew up in rural areas, said that there is no shortage of high-quality agricultural products in rural areas, but good things cannot be sold at a good price. The logistics chain of agricultural products has five or six links, agents earn nearly 80% of the profits, and farmers are at the bottom of the industrial value chain. In 2014, he founded Meicai, an e-commerce for vegetables, which aims to provide fresh vegetable distribution to small and medium-sized restaurants, helping farmers achieve the docking of production and marketing, while minimizing the circulation of agricultural products and increasing farmers' income. it also reduces the cost of raw materials for restaurants.

Finding the market is only the first step, the key is how to deliver the agricultural products in time. Liu Chuanjun said frankly that the way for e-commerce, which specializes in fresh agricultural products, to survive is fast transportation and high product quality, which must be based on a developed logistics system. In the early days of its startup, Meicai worked with a number of express delivery companies, but none of them could meet the requirements in terms of speed, quality control and loss rate.

In desperation, Liu Chuanjun can only build his own cold chain logistics system. He said that the cost of fresh cold chain logistics is 2 times higher than that of ordinary logistics, and cold chain costs account for 25% of sales. Coupled with cold chain equipment, operation and maintenance, the burden is quite heavy. "We hope to increase policy support such as finance and taxation to appropriately reduce the burden on the cold chain logistics industry. At the same time, enhance the large-scale and intensive level of cold chain transportation, and develop third-party cold chain logistics. "

Logistics is the pain point of rural e-commerce. Wang Jie, the director of rural logistics at Cainiao Network, is often asked by farmers, "how to sell our good products?" Wang said that how to transport good agricultural products to the market is also a big problem for rural e-commerce. On the one hand, the logistics network has not yet covered many rural areas, and there are obstacles in the decline of consumer goods and the upstream of agricultural products. On the other hand, the level of logistics facilities is low, which can not meet the transport needs of fresh agricultural products.

Some large e-commerce enterprises began to lay out rural logistics. Alibaba launched the Thousand County Ten Thousand Village Plan and invested 10 billion yuan to set up 1000 county-level operation centers and 100000 village-level service stations within three to five years. SUNING has reached the last kilometer of rural market services through more than 1600 stores, and more than 90 percent of the areas have reached the next day. JD.com has built advanced multi-temperature cold storage in 10 cities across the country, covering 63 large and medium-sized cities.

It is also being pushed at the government level. The Ministry of Agriculture organizes new agricultural operators to dock with e-commerce platforms to carry out fresh agricultural products to cities in 10 provinces, and supports infrastructure construction such as graded packaging and cold chain logistics. Gao Yan, vice minister of the Ministry of Commerce, said that in the first half of 2016, a total of 9.6 billion yuan of national special construction funds were used to drive 160 billion yuan of social funds to support the construction of 182 agricultural products wholesale markets and cold chain circulation facilities. At the same time, large-scale e-commerce, agricultural production and circulation enterprises and local governments will be organized to promote the upgrading of traditional circulation channels in rural areas.

What do you need to do well in rural e-commerce?

Have enthusiasm, but also have a better understanding of rural agriculture

Lu Man from Jiangsu followed the traditional "winner" track: she graduated from college and entered a well-paid state-owned enterprise until she followed her boyfriend to Chenjia Village, Gaozuo Town, Jianhu County, Yancheng. Their parents strongly opposed it, and the villagers around them also thought that they came back because they could not survive in the city. But the young couple have their own ideas. "We want to make youth different, and we want to make the villagers rich and change the appearance of the countryside."

Ideal plump, realistic bone feeling. On the way to starting a business, I encountered a lot of problems. First, it was frustrated in terms of funds. In the early days of their start-up, they tasted the sadness that they could not borrow money everywhere. Breeding also encountered trouble, tried a lot of breeding varieties, did not succeed, after a long time of trial and error, just chose a good turkey to raise and sell.

The problem of money has been solved through self-financing, loans and supporting funds. They set up an online sales platform and widened the market. "starting a business in rural areas is by no means as simple as imagined, and it is difficult to succeed simply by relying on enthusiasm." Luhmann said. Now, their turkey business is on the right track, many big businessmen from other places come here, and the scale of turkey farming is getting bigger and bigger. She said that seeing that unpopular turkeys have become so popular through the Internet, the views of the villagers have changed, and many people have taken the initiative to seek cooperation. At present, the breeding base realizes turkey ecological breeding processing and sales, feather handicraft research and development as one, driving 1804 farmers across the country.

Flee from the north, Shanghai and Guangzhou and go home to do e-commerce. The deep integration of the Internet and agriculture has profoundly changed agriculture and rural areas and inspired more young people to return home to start their own businesses. The average annual growth rate of college students returning home to start businesses has been maintained at about double digits. By the end of 2015, the proportion of college graduates returning home to start businesses increased from 0.5% to 1%. They have the knowledge of culture, technology and management, which inject new vitality into rural development and bring new momentum to the transformation and upgrading of agriculture.

However, the "new farmers" cross-border agricultural e-commerce has a lot of discomfort. Guo Hongdong, a professor at the China Rural Development Research Institute of Zhejiang University, said: many new farmers are very enthusiastic, but they are not familiar with "agriculture, rural areas and farmers", do not understand rural production, and will not deal with farmers. There is even a situation in which the market channels have been opened up, but the supply of agricultural products has gone wrong. Only by becoming compound talents who are proficient in Internet and agriculture, can we do a good job in "Internet +" agriculture.

How to bridge the "digital gap" between urban and rural areas?