Agricultural product e-commerce: why can't city people beat farmers at their own game?

E-commerce, in people's impression, is a high-end and prestigious thing, generally only urban veteran internet professionals and big capital can make it work. But when it comes to agricultural product e-commerce, the grafting of agriculture and e-commerce, although city people talk about it endlessly, with all kinds of concepts and models flying everywhere, they always seem unable to get a handle on it, and even run into wall after wall.

As an increasingly hot concept, many capitals and organizations want to enter this industry and get a share of the pie, but the gap between ideals and reality makes them return defeated every time. Instead, it is the locally grown new farmers who have a deeper understanding of agricultural e-commerce.

By a stroke of luck, before the holiday this author took part in the online crowdfunding of Sichuan Hanyuan large cherries on the Suning Crowdfunding platform, and since it happened to be on the May Day travel route, I stopped by to investigate and see how the large cherries about to be eaten were growing.

Sichuan Hanyuan, as a famous major large cherry production area in China, operates a cooperative model that is relatively scientific in both specialization and organization. The chairman of the cooperative, Zhu Guirong, is a capable middle-aged man. As the conversation deepened, the local cooperative leaders' determination and enthusiasm for getting agricultural products online left a deep impression.

Zhu Guirong said that in fact, according to previous years' situations, there was no need to graft onto e-commerce, because every time the harvest season came, many first-tier channel distributors would station themselves collectively in the local area and buy cherries directly from farmers. Good products do not worry about sales, and cherry-growing farmers are actually not waiting to be saved by e-commerce as we understand it. But even so, the cooperative still now carries out contact with the internet and e-commerce as a strategy, and even if the price is lower than the usual purchase price, they still strive to get online, to dress local agricultural products in internet clothes so more people can see them. Do not think this is just a fashion played by the government. In fact, this concept has already become a consensus among local farmers.

Farmers are not far from e-commerce at all.

After the concept of agricultural product e-commerce became hot, many online platforms approached the cooperative through various means, hoping to cooperate and sell large cherries on their platforms. But the cooperative is selective about platforms, and has even ruthlessly rejected many e-commerce platforms. Zhu Guirong said with a smile: "Many e-commerce platforms actually just want to use our high-quality and low-priced cherries to do some self-marketing along the way. In the long run, there is no substantive improvement for our industry brand and product channel development. And considering factors such as product branding, the cooperative does have certain entry thresholds when choosing e-commerce platforms."

This was unexpected. This author had always thought that e-commerce platforms played the role of savior for farmer friends, but the actual situation is that e-commerce platforms do not have much say in agricultural product places of origin. Farmer friends are not foolish, and are even a bit "picky."

E-commerce platforms need to provide branding support for local agricultural products

For agricultural products, e-commerce and other online channels themselves have media attributes and easily help with product branding. Once brand premium is formed, the cooperative has certain pricing power, and after branding, it can explore new business models such as picking tourism, making Hanyuan cherry-related industries bloom in all directions.

Therefore, the cooperation platform must be a nationwide large e-commerce company. Such a company itself has considerable traffic, and must also give Hanyuan cherries certain promotional resources. This is a key consideration.

According to Zhu Guirong, when Suning Crowdfunding was investigating Hanyuan cherries, the cooperative was actually also investigating Suning Crowdfunding. Suning Crowdfunding is a crowdfunding platform that had just launched in April, with strong support for agricultural products, and with Suning Commerce's overall fresh food e-commerce strategic layout, agricultural products will be a very important part of it. This was actually a good opportunity for Hanyuan cherries to strategically go online. Only then did the cooperative firm up its confidence in cooperating with Suning Crowdfunding.

The supporting service system of the e-commerce platform must be very mature

The cooperative led by Zhu Guirong had not done no homework before going online. They studied a large number of previous agricultural product e-commerce cases. They found that many agricultural product e-commerce concepts were developed vigorously, but the key logistics and distribution could not keep up, and ultimately consumers did not buy it, and it even affected the reputation of the agricultural product place of origin.

"The improvement of related supporting support is necessary. For example, whether the platform can provide accurate and real-time data support, whether it has mature experience cooperating with other specialty agricultural products, and whether the fresh food logistics and distribution system can support our products reaching consumers' dining tables as quickly as possible... all of these are to protect our consumers' user experience, so that grafting onto e-commerce does not discount consumers' experience."

For example, in this cherry crowdfunding campaign, because cherries have a very short freshness period and spoil easily, and during logistics they must not be dropped or knocked, the logistics requirements are very high. Suning specially provided a complete logistics system for this campaign. If you are in Beijing, Hanyuan cherries depart in the morning and arrive by evening, reaching consumers' dining tables at night.

Through exchanges with local cooperative leaders and farmers, one can clearly feel the openness and inclusiveness of local people's mindset. They are willing to accept new things from the outside world and actively try new models of changing agricultural production through the internet. Most importantly, by practically doing "agricultural e-commerce," local farmers have already walked to the forefront of agricultural e-commerce and formed a set of effective models. In this respect alone, they are indeed much wiser than many theorists engaging in armchair strategizing.

Agricultural e-commerce is making a great clamor in the current internet context, but the real helmsmen are the new farmers walking in the fields and at the edges of the land. They use e-commerce thinking to boost their own agricultural products online, and use practical action to change and build their hometowns.

As the primary industry that has existed since ancient times, agriculture is the basic industry on which our large agricultural country depends for survival. The addition of more fresh elements represented by e-commerce lets agricultural products deep in the mountains get online, and through cross-boundary cooperation and mixing, the exploration and formation of new agricultural development models, a merit for a thousand years, will surely achieve results and shine brilliantly. The future rural landscape will be so beautiful it makes people envious.

On the way back, it seemed I had even more expectations for the Suning Crowdfunding Hanyuan large cherries that were about to arrive.