What exactly is agricultural-input e-commerce? This article explains it
When an industry enters a deadlock, disruptive forces always emerge. The reason agricultural-input e-commerce has sprung up like bamboo shoots after rain this year ultimately lies in the fact that it has touched the industry's pain points. Agricultural-input enterprises getting involved in e-commerce is not hype, bandwagon-jumping or blind action. Unlike what many people imagine, although agricultural-input e-commerce faces numerous difficulties, it is being recognized by more and more enterprises, distributors and even new-type farmers, and this is the positive energy of agricultural-input e-commerce development. For an individual e-commerce enterprise, we cannot predict whether it will succeed; but as an industry, agricultural-input e-commerce will ultimately have those who laugh last.
Farmers' e-commerce platforms are fair
Why do scam gangs succeed time and again? Why do scam gangs who come from far away often move farmers more than the distributors at their doorstep? This is a question worth pondering. Fundamentally, it can be summed up in two words: trust. The root cause of the lack of trust lies in information asymmetry: opaque prices and a proliferation of counterfeits.
The emergence of agricultural-input e-commerce platforms will, first of all, make price information for all kinds of agricultural inputs transparent. Farmers can shop around, and they need not fear counterfeits and inferior goods; once a problem arises, farmers have a clear channel for tracing and claiming compensation. In particular, with the tide of “Internet + agriculture”, agricultural technical services and agricultural-input e-commerce can be fully combined in the future, and the professionalization and timeliness of agrochemical services will be greatly enhanced.
Of course, at the current stage, how to cultivate farmers' ability to go online is a major topic, but this problem is not unsolvable either. We can see that many e-commerce platforms nowadays provide a reference for solving this problem by developing offline purchasing agents and promoting membership systems. More importantly, we cannot view the future with today's eyes. At a time when humanity is striding into an information society, agricultural inputs and agriculture cannot remain exceptions forever.
⟦NL> Distributors take e-commerce as an opportunity for transformation
Distributors are not uniformly resistant to agricultural-input e-commerce. If one observes carefully, it is not hard to find that more and more people are taking this as an opportunity for business transformation.
In recent years, whether large agents or retailers, simply selling products has become increasingly difficult for achieving business expansion. On the one hand, there are too many competitors and too few opportunities; on the other hand, sales on credit have held them back. Rather than sinking deeper into this rut, it is better to switch to being a service provider, no longer worrying about selling products and sales on credit, and professionally providing logistics distribution and agricultural technical services for agricultural-input e-commerce platforms, concentrating superior resources on doing what one is better at. Clearly, the emerging agricultural-input e-commerce provides this possibility.
Production enterprises increase their degree of control over channels
What is the biggest pain point for production enterprises? Good agricultural inputs cannot outsell inferior ones, and the real Li Kui cannot beat the fake Li Gui. The core reason lies in the fact that the multi-tier distribution model leads to excessively high terminal sales prices, while inferior fertilizers are generally delivered directly to retailers or farmers, and coupled with tricks in costs, at the terminal we often see that good products are deterred by price factors and make farmers hesitate. The emergence of e-commerce makes it possible for production enterprises to cut out intermediate links and pass benefits on to retailers or farmers, thereby competing for the market at more reasonable prices.
At present, several enterprises in the agricultural-input industry have already built their own e-commerce platforms, and it is believed that many more will follow, and a situation of chaotic competition is taking shape. The author believes that large enterprises can consider building their own e-commerce platforms, and in terms of model they can have two choices: first, to make a third-party open platform and absorb more products to settle in; second, to make an enterprise e-commerce platform similar to those of Xiaomi and Gree. At the same time, large enterprises often face more prominent conflicts between traditional channels and online channels, so in the early stage they might as well register dedicated online brands, while small and medium-sized enterprises are small enough to turn around easily, have no need for repeated construction, and making good use of existing platforms is a rational choice.
As for the difficult problem of logistics distribution, the author believes that the agricultural-input O2O currently beginning to show signs of emergence is expected to solve this contradiction, transforming offline traditional channels into logistics distribution centers and warehousing centers, and with the future application of big data, reasonably determining the inventory of a certain region through data analysis, the difficult problem of timely distribution can be gradually overcome.