E-commerce online shopping uncovers a vast rural consumer market

If you can't buy it, you just haven't thought of it. From daily necessities such as toothpaste and toothbrushes, shoes, hats, clothes and socks, to quirky items that city dwellers would never imagine, such as slides, pavilions and ice cream machines, all have become objects of online shopping for villagers.

Rural online shopping has rapidly revived the long-dormant vast rural consumer market - this is what the reporter learned during a recent interview in rural Zhejiang.

Xinye Village in Jiande City, more than 170 km from downtown Hangzhou, is surrounded by mountains with pleasant scenery. For a long time, villagers here often had to spend one or two hours to get into the city to shop, but now, through Alibaba's rural Taobao service stations, they can enjoy the convenience of shopping without leaving home.

Ye Zhaodong, bustling at the entrance of the Xinye Village Taobao service station, is the young owner of a "nongjiale" farmhouse restaurant in the village. When the reporter saw him, he was assembling a flower stand he had just bought online. "Things online are, first, cheap, and second, they can be delivered to your door; most importantly, the variety is complete. Take this flower stand - if I went into the city to buy it, I might wander around Hangzhou for three days and still not necessarily find it." Ye Zhaodong told the reporter that he had already bought 40,000 to 50,000 yuan worth of goods through the service station, including large items such as a popcorn machine and a freezer.

The person who helped Ye Zhaodong complete his "Taobao" shopping was Ye Lei, a villager of Xinye Village. Ye Lei's other identity is a partner of the Alibaba Rural Taobao Xinye Village service station. Ye Lei's main daily work is simple to describe: helping villagers buy needed goods online, while also handling delivery and pickup of the goods. Much of the time Ye Lei is surrounded by villagers shopping online.

"Village Taobao" does not happen in just one place. At the Zhujia Village Taobao service station 40 km from Xingye Village, village Taobao partner Xia Qi is likewise surrounded by villagers placing online orders. Because the village has a relatively large permanent population and there is also a cement plant nearby, people come to her for proxy shopping in an endless stream.

"Grandpas and grandmas who never bought anything online before now also ask me to help them shop." Xia Qi told the reporter that there is a bamboo craftsman in his 70s in the village who, seeing that others had bought good-quality and cheap bamboo mats online, also came running to ask her to help him "Taobao."

"He makes bamboo mats himself, yet he went online to 'shop' for bamboo mats, and the old craftsman was laughed at by the villagers for quite a few days. But the grandpa said the online one sold for only 69 yuan and could be used on both sides, so it was worth it." Xia Qi said.

From shopping only in a small supermarket of a few dozen sq m at the village entrance to now shopping globally through the Internet, this new consumption phenomenon has begun to become the norm in rural areas of China's Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions.

"E-commerce companies extending their channels downward has solved the long-standing rural logistics problem of 'reaching the town but not the village,' and e-commerce is releasing the passion for consumption in rural areas." said Xu Zheng, head of the western Zhejiang region of Alibaba's Rural Taobao business unit.

Behind villagers' enthusiasm for Village Taobao lies a rapidly rising vast rural consumer market. A research report by the Ministry of Commerce pointed out that at present rural China has 25 air conditioners per 100 households, one-fifth of that in cities and towns. If rural household appliance consumption reached urban levels, more than 200 million additional air conditioners, 60 million refrigerators and 60 million washing machines would be needed. The "China Taobao Village Research Report (2014)" predicted that the rural online shopping consumer market would rapidly expand from 180 billion yuan three years earlier to 460 billion yuan in 2016. Based on this huge potential, domestic e-commerce giants such as Alibaba, JD.com and Suning began accelerating their expansion into rural areas. Among them, Alibaba launched the "Thousand Counties, Ten Thousand Villages" plan at the end of last year, planning to invest 10 billion yuan within 3 to 5 years to establish 1,000 county-level operating centers and 100,000 village-level service stations, deeply tapping the blue ocean market of rural consumption.

"The rise in rural incomes in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions, the increase in people returning home to start businesses, and the improvement of rural infrastructure have further created conditions for the warming of rural consumption in Jiangsu and Zhejiang." said Li Guoxiang, a researcher at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

In addition, the reporter also found during interviews that while the rural consumer market in Jiangsu and Zhejiang is becoming more vigorous, the rural economic ecosystem is also expected to improve.

Just a month ago, Ye Lei posted a recruitment notice in front of the service station: "Now recruiting one Taobao image processing designer and two customer service specialists. Finding a good job at your doorstep is not a dream."

"The lotus seed wine in our village is quite famous, and many people online are interested in it. Next I plan to help the villagers sell local goods online and build up the village's local specialty business." Ye Lei said full of confidence.

"We have abundant agricultural product resources here, and some distinctive agricultural industries have a good reputation, but we have long suffered from being unable to find a market. However, rural e-commerce is now helping open up sales channels for local agricultural products, and more and more people are returning to start businesses after working elsewhere." Tong Dinggan, mayor of Jiande City, believes that rural e-commerce is accelerating the urbanization of rural consumption, the onlineization of industry and the localization of employment, creating a strong pull for rural entrepreneurship and employment.