Rural e-commerce becomes a new blue ocean for platforms, with 60% of orders coming from mobile devices
The demographic dividend for e-commerce in cities above Tier 3 is gradually disappearing, and the market landscape has gradually taken shape. As a result, channel sinking and expanding into new markets have become the strategic direction for many e-commerce companies over the past year. Among these, the rural market has especially become a strategic-level market in the eyes of e-commerce giants such as Alibaba and JD.com, and they are all actively building county-level service centers in the hope of prying open this frozen layer. E-commerce companies that go deep into the fields to "paint walls" are even more commonplace.
According to relevant surveys, mobile phones have become the most important online shopping terminal. 64.2% of rural netizens shop via mobile phones, while only 32.9% shop using computers. It can be said that mobile phones are not only the most important online shopping terminal for rural netizens, but also their most important internet access terminal. The explosion of the mobile internet has not only accelerated the mobileization process for many PC netizens, but also turned many rural people who had not yet accessed the internet directly into mobile internet users.
43.5% of rural users visit e-commerce websites multiple times within a week, a proportion only 10% different from urban users. "Browsing e-commerce" has become a relatively high-frequency internet behavior for rural users. At the same time, a comparable proportion, about 44%, are people who "only browse when they have shopping needs." It can be seen that when using e-commerce services, rural users are divided into two major groups: "high-frequency users" and "demand-driven users."
Although nearly half of rural users have developed the habit of visiting e-commerce websites multiple times a week, when it comes to actual purchases, this proportion drops to 17.9%, while the proportion of people whose consumption behavior is generated by clear purchasing needs increases to 61.4%. It can be seen that rural users' e-commerce consumption behavior is relatively rational and clearly purpose-driven.
In addition, 73.6% of rural users say the e-commerce websites they use most often are Taobao and Tmall, while most of the remainder choose self-operated e-commerce platforms such as JD.com and Yihaodian, accounting for 18.8%. The top three purchase categories for rural users are "home appliances and electronic products," "clothing," and "agricultural supplies and tools." Among them, the first two categories are also the favorite purchase categories of urban users, belonging to popular categories at the mass level. The third category is a more distinctive shopping need specific to rural users. At present, e-commerce giants such as Alibaba and JD.com are actively promoting rural e-commerce, selling seeds, fertilizers, agricultural tools and other goods to the rural market. Judging from user feedback, 10% of users have already developed this kind of consumption habit.
The survey shows that rural users care most about product prices, followed by product quality. Users who care about price when shopping online reach 34.7%, the highest proportion. The other issues they care about, in order, are after-sales service, logistics, payment, and completeness of categories. In this regard, the two user groups, urban and rural, do not show much difference, which shows that everyone's demands for online shopping services are relatively consistent. It is worth mentioning that rural users' dissatisfaction with "logistics cannot deliver to the doorstep" far exceeds that of urban users, reaching 17.6%, which is directly related to the incomplete construction of the rural logistics system. In terms of payment, only 3.6% of rural users say online payment causes inconvenience, a proportion comparable to urban users. It can be seen that the penetration of third-party payment services in rural areas is already not much different from that in cities and will not cause inconvenience to users' online shopping behavior.
The imperfect logistics system affects users' experience in two ways. In terms of sending express deliveries, 38.3% of rural users say that "they cannot conveniently send express deliveries and must go to a designated location," the highest proportion. 8.7% of users say they "can hardly send at all," and this result differs greatly from urban users.
"Going to the countryside to paint walls" has become a necessary action for e-commerce rural promotion, and all e-commerce giants have increased their promotion efforts since the second half of last year. But even so, 40.7% of rural users still say they have almost never seen advertisements for e-commerce websites in the living areas near them. Users who occasionally see them account for 41.3%, while only 17.9% often see them. There is still a lot of room for e-commerce rural promotion to advance, especially for e-commerce brands that are not yet familiar to rural users.