Why do cherries and pineapples have different lives with the same fruit?

Recently, there has been an uproar over the "rotten pineapple" incident in Xuwen County, Guangdong Province. Tmall e-commerce "Benxiansheng" helped Xuwen County, Guangdong Province, sell the backlog of pineapples that could not be sold, but the pineapples rotted and nearly lost money because of simple packaging, long transportation and other reasons.

In sharp contrast, cherries, lychees and other seasonal fruits are in short supply, online sales feedback is excellent, e-commerce are scrambling for supplies.

It is also a fruit, why does e-commerce sell pineapples and cherries with completely different endings?

Cherry: pick by order, direct by air

April and May is the ripening period of cherries. Unlike most other fruits that go to physical stores for retail, cherry e-commerce platform sales are astonishingly high, and most of these cherries come from Yantai, Shandong province. It is reported that 25% of the cherries in Yantai are currently sold through e-commerce.

At present, the biggest difficulty of fresh e-commerce is cold chain preservation and transportation, and cherries, as fruits preserved at room temperature for 3-4 days and refrigerated for a week, do not have any advantage in shelf life.

In this regard, the treatment method of local cherry growers in Yantai is by air transportation, picking immediately after receiving the order, and then arriving in the hands of consumers after 1-2 days of air transportation, so they happen to be in the four-day shelf life of cherries. At present, the temperature in most parts of the country is still below 30 °, and there is no need for cold chain transportation.

On the other hand, because they have reached cooperation with Tmall, JD.com and other fresh e-commerce companies, many cherries are sold in advance, and orders have been sold through e-commerce before maturity. If it is a spot transaction with the retailer after picking, the loss will increase, because cherries, as a seasonal fruit, are all listed centrally in a short period of time, and if they do not go through the e-commerce channel, a large amount of inventory will be squeezed because buyers cannot be found.

Pineapple: blindly following the e-commerce channel leads to the loss of money.

Whether it is cherry or litchi, have cooperated with e-commerce and express companies many times, and formed a set of their own picking, transportation, service program. On the other hand, the pineapple incident in Xuwen County lost due to the lack of understanding of the local situation and blindly followed the e-commerce channel for sales.

Pineapples in Xuwen County, Guangdong Province are slow to sell this year, and some media reported that "no one can buy a dime a jin", so a "stupid Xiansheng" Tmall flagship store purchased more than 600,000 jin of local pineapples for sale in Tmall, with free delivery of 29.9 yuan for 10 jin. It was intended to solve the inventory for farmers, but because the packaging was too simple and the shipping time was too long, customers reported that the pineapples were basically bad after receiving the goods, so the store finally chose to remove all the products from the shelves and shut down.

The root cause of this consequence is that Xuwen County does not have the conditions to do fresh e-commerce. It is reported that there is no good local packaging factory, and express e-commerce docking is basically blank. Therefore, the Tmall flagship store did not sign a contract directly with local farmers. second, it went to the spot market to purchase the fruit. The fruit was already very mature. It was shipped back, packaged and delivered, and then delivered to customers. This is too long a transportation cycle for fresh e-commerce. And pineapple because of its large size and cost of packing materials, if you are not willing to put it on the carton, it will only rot faster. This is the reason for the failure of this well-intentioned but penniless flagship store.