Where will the "wind" of agricultural e-commerce blow?

This year's No.1 Document of the Central Committee proposed to accelerate the development of rural e-commerce and form a two-way circulation pattern of online and offline integration, agricultural products entering the city and agricultural materials and consumer goods going to the countryside.

At present, the average annual growth rate of agricultural product network transaction volume is more than 50%, but only 1% of 3000 platform-based agricultural product e-commerce companies realize profits. How does agricultural product e-commerce no longer lose money? Next, where will the wind blow? The reporter interviewed experts and industry insiders.

From retail to wholesale

E-commerce application of agricultural products is increasingly perfect

According to the White Paper on E-commerce of Ali Agricultural Products released by Ali Research Institute, in 2015, Ali platform completed the sales of agricultural products of 69.55 billion yuan, and the number of sellers operating agricultural products exceeded 900,000. In terms of geographical distribution, Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu have the largest number of agricultural product sellers, among which Guangdong has more than 100,000; Shaanxi, Shanxi and Jiangxi provinces have the fastest growth rate, among which Shaanxi reaches 56.35%.

At present, the development of agricultural products e-commerce in China has entered the growth period and is turning to multi-subject joint drive, from long-term wandering in information services to online transactions. At present, all kinds of market entities such as agricultural products production, processing and circulation are optimistic about online sales, and the role of organizing and promoting the development of agricultural products e-commerce is prominent. On the basis of physical store operation, introduce e-commerce, online and offline combination, online store and physical store fly together.

Mention online and offline combination, Le Village Tao is an example. Le Village Tao is the first village O2O e-commerce platform in China, upgrading and transforming small shops in villages and towns into offline experience stores, helping farmers buy and sell agricultural products online through experience stores. In March this year, Le Village Tao launched the "jujube gathering Luliang" sales jujube activity, more than 60,000 villages and towns experience stores to help Shanxi Luliang jujube farmers sell red dates. At present, Luliang jujube sales in the country reached more than 3 million yuan.

Le Village Tao launched "Le 6 episodes" suitable for rural status quo. Zhao Shiquan, chairman of the board of directors, said that "Le 6 Fair" means every 6 fairs. Farmers like to go to the city to go to the fair. We move this offline fair to the Internet so that farmers can not leave the village and catch up with the market online. On the 6th, 16th and 26th of each month, farmers place orders, sell and distribute centrally, which greatly reduces logistics costs and procurement costs.

Not only is e-commerce transforming traditional rural retail terminals, but the traditional agricultural approval market is also accelerating its integration with e-commerce. Agricultural batch market is an important link in the circulation of agricultural products, and people's first impression is often disorder. At present, there are more than 4000 large and medium-sized agricultural approval markets in China, and 80% of agricultural products have to pass through agricultural approval markets every year before reaching consumers. However, the agricultural batch market is dominated by the traditional mode of "paying money and delivering goods". During the transaction process, manual handling, weighing and counting are time-consuming and laborious.

A few days ago, Wuhan Baishazhou Market settled in Gudeng E-commerce Platform, upgraded the trading mode, promoted the mobile APP online trading mode, realized offline experience and online trading, and gradually cultivated new trading habits of merchants and buyers. Electronic scales are laid in Baishazhou market. With the help of e-commerce platform, electronic scales are connected to POS machine. Orders can be generated with one key when weighing. The transaction information is sent to APP of both buyers and sellers synchronously. Buyers can understand the real product price information of shops on the platform.

From good trading to bad profits

Platform-type e-commerce competition is white-hot

The market capacity is huge, and the e-commerce of agricultural products naturally becomes the object of capital pursuit. "In 2012, fresh e-commerce started, Chu orange entered Beijing, litchi war, large-scale e-commerce and express enterprises entered the fresh food field one after another;" From 2013 to 2014, various modes such as B2C and O2O emerged at the same time, and Internet agricultural innovation such as pre-sale, crowdfunding and traceability surged;"In 2015, agricultural products e-commerce entered the climax period of financing and merger and reorganization, with various financing exceeding RMB 7 billion yuan... More social capital entered the agricultural products e-commerce feast one after another."

In 2015, the online retail transaction volume of agricultural products reached 150.5 billion yuan, an increase of more than 50%. Alibaba, Jingdong and other platform-based comprehensive e-commerce continue to expand the territory of village-level service stations; Agricultural materials e-commerce such as Nongshang No.1 and Aizhong Net allow farmers to buy agricultural materials without leaving home; Fresh e-commerce such as Shunfeng Preferred and Youcai Net meet the taste demand of urban consumers; B2B agricultural e-commerce such as Yimu Field and Cloud Farm drives the production and marketing docking of agricultural products... The major "outlets" of "Internet + Agriculture" are developing rapidly.

In sharp contrast to the booming market and happy Taobao sellers, the profit data of platform-based agricultural products e-commerce is cold.

Data show that at present, only 1% of domestic agricultural products e-commerce can make profits, 7% suffer huge losses, 88% suffer slight losses and 4% are flat. Many agricultural products e-commerce websites have the problem of convergence investment and repeated construction leading to operating losses. Only the agricultural products e-commerce closed in 2015 include fruit business, special soil network, purchasing brother, kitchen network, vegetable steward, etc.

"The main reasons are the lack of characteristics on one side of the thousand nets, the small unit price and small scale of customers, insufficient user experience and poor customer service quality, imperfect supply chain and cold chain mode, and the opposition between self-operated logistics and outsourced logistics." Hong Tao, director of the Institute of Commercial Economics of Beijing University of Industry and Commerce and an expert on agricultural products e-commerce, said that although the agricultural products e-commerce industry has ushered in unprecedented development opportunities, the loss and collapse of agricultural products e-commerce must also be paid great attention to.

The personage inside course of study thinks, the current agricultural product standardization is insufficient, fresh logistics is not matched, etc. all to the Internet to promote the circulation of agricultural products constitute obstacles. First, there is a lack of uniformity in production standards and quality standards for agricultural products. Product standards, packaging standards, distribution standards, quality standards, etc. are not perfect enough; second, some rural areas are located in remote areas, and the tentacles of logistics are not extended enough. The development of logistics industry is obviously lacking, the fresh-keeping technology, storage capacity and distribution strength are uneven, especially the cold chain logistics capacity is insufficient.

From Policy to Market

The e-commerce environment will be significantly improved

At present, there are more than 3000 agricultural products e-commerce platforms nationwide, and the online trading volume of agricultural products has increased rapidly. Many places have accumulated a lot of experience in practice. According to the report of Ali Research Institute, there are many new bright spots in the innovation of agricultural products e-commerce, including innovation from traceability to quality control and supply system; improvement of infrastructure from logistics to finance; innovation from wealth creation to poverty alleviation and social responsibility.

Since last year, China's agricultural products e-commerce has presented the dual characteristics of government promotion and market promotion. On the one hand, more than 10 ministries and commissions such as the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Finance have issued a number of documents conducive to supporting the development of rural e-commerce from different angles and fields. On the other hand, driven by the market, large enterprises such as Ali, Jingdong and Suning have entered the countryside, increasingly showing a market pattern of "two super, multiple strong and one large area".

Agricultural products e-commerce enters the development period from the growth period, requiring operators to make up for shortcomings in marketing environment and infrastructure. A number of industry insiders said to reporters that through policy measures, we should solve the problems that a single e-commerce enterprise wanted to do but could not do well in the past, and solve the institutional and institutional obstacles to the development of agricultural e-commerce. For example, rural logistics distribution needs to be promoted as a whole within the county scope in order to reduce costs; preferential support measures for land use, electricity consumption and network use that e-commerce has been looking forward to for a long time should also be implemented as soon as possible.

The reporter learned that due to information asymmetry and imperfect integrity system, consumers who buy agricultural products on e-commerce platforms will have many concerns. For example, some agricultural products claim to be "organic" but are not in fact "organic"; some claim to be soil eggs but are not actually "soil". In addition, the construction of trading rules, safety traceability, claim mechanism and dispute resolution is still insufficient, resulting in a certain phenomenon of "bad money driving out good money" in agricultural products e-commerce.

"With the promotion of e-commerce branding, e-commerce enterprises need to extend to the front end of the supply chain and ensure the quality, safety and standardization of agricultural products through organizational innovation breakthroughs, thus laying a solid foundation for branding." Jiang Wenlong, China Rural Development Research Institute of Zhejiang University, believes that online problems need to be solved offline, and the uncertainty of non-standard agricultural products should be solved through standardization, so that Chinese agricultural products can return to their due sense of value.

"We encourage comprehensive e-commerce enterprises to expand agricultural e-commerce business, support vertical agricultural e-commerce enterprises to develop and grow, and guide qualified traditional agricultural products circulation enterprises and agricultural means of production and distribution enterprises to develop e-commerce." Wang Xiaobing, deputy director of the Marketing Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, said that the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Commerce have proposed to implement policies such as land use, water use and network use to support the development of agricultural e-commerce, and establish and improve diversified and multi-channel investment and financing mechanisms to adapt to the development of e-commerce; by 2018, the infrastructure conditions for agricultural e-commerce will be significantly improved.