Integrated development of animal husbandry and e-commerce needs institutional safeguards
Recently, an article titled "E-commerce in the Animal Husbandry Industry Needs to Pass Five Gates" published online caught the author's attention. The article pointed out that combining animal husbandry with e-commerce requires passing the gates of trust, talent, goods, service, and logistics, involving product quality, standards, talent requirements, service guarantees, and logistics costs. Although the formulation is rather rough, it can be said to be "a direct hit."
It should be said that, compared with other industries, the combination of animal husbandry and e-commerce has its particularities and higher internal requirements. From a practical point of view, most animal husbandry practitioners and their business premises are located far from cities and county towns. They are accustomed to concentrating their purchasing of needed products in cities during a certain period, and they have a certain dependence on and habit of using related branded products. This places higher demands on the combination of animal husbandry and e-commerce. For example, this group has many practical needs regarding e-commerce, such as "products need to be trial-tested, quality needs to be verified, variety changes should be allowed, emergency needs must be guaranteed, and online shopping costs should be lower than the cost of purchasing on their own." This requires e-commerce to comprehensively and meticulously take into account the needs of this group and make relevant service commitments.
It can be predicted that once the combination of animal husbandry and e-commerce breaks through bottlenecks such as habitual product-use positioning, real-time quality verification, and ensuring the implementation of after-sales service, its promotion and application will naturally follow.
On the one hand, it is necessary to use the government's public credibility to remove users' worries about the combination of animal husbandry and e-commerce. "Gold cups and silver cups are not as good as the people's praise." Out of practical considerations such as high operating costs, urgent need to prevent and control emergencies, and difficulty in safeguarding interests when harmed, animal husbandry practitioners often dare not easily accept products sold online, fearing irreparable losses caused by counterfeit and shoddy products. It is necessary for e-commerce to actively communicate and coordinate with government departments such as industry and commerce administration and animal husbandry management, and to win the trust of relevant government departments and users' praise with complete after-sales service such as "products can be trial-tested, varieties can be changed, emergency needs can be met at any time, and quality is absolutely guaranteed," thereby laying the foundation for the development of the combination of animal husbandry and e-commerce.
On the other hand, it is necessary to establish and improve an industry self-discipline system for the combination of animal husbandry and e-commerce. In advancing the combination of animal husbandry and e-commerce, it is necessary, based on the reality that animal husbandry practitioners are dependent on marketed products, to comprehensively establish and improve a complete industry self-discipline supervision system and a supporting series of safeguard systems, eliminate users' habits and dependence, and in particular insure the quality of sold products and establish a compensation guarantee fund for users' rights protection, so as to use practical actions to encourage users to change their fixed usage habits and, from the very beginning, win this group's trust through honest operation and conscientious operation.
In addition, it is necessary to establish a communication and mutual trust safeguard mechanism directly connecting to manufacturers. The depth of the combination of animal husbandry and e-commerce depends most crucially on animal husbandry practitioners' degree of trust in relevant manufacturers. This requires that, when developing animal husbandry e-commerce, direct contact channels between this group and manufacturers as well as honest mutual guarantee channels be established to ensure that the legitimate rights and interests of both sides are protected.
Finally, it is also necessary to begin with online platforms and carry out open, fair, and transparent operations throughout the entire process, supplemented by actively accepting supervision from the media and relevant government departments, so as to accelerate the pace of the combination of animal husbandry and e-commerce.