How can the trust challenge in agricultural product e-commerce be solved? Experts offer their advice
E-commerce has become a hot topic of discussion, with endless streams of internet companies carrying out all kinds of innovation in new fields and new business formats, leaving people overwhelmed. And how to gain consumer trust is also a challenge faced by agricultural product e-commerce. Amid rapid development, how can e-commerce solve the consumer trust challenge? Let us look at the analysis and advice offered by experts at the 2014 International Symposium on Brand Agriculture Development.
Fragmentation of the agricultural chain leads to distrust
Zhang Li, vice president of the China High-Quality Agricultural Products Development and Service Association, led a team that spent more than three years investigating what problems actually exist in China's agricultural circulation.
The research found that in China's agriculture, or rather in China's agricultural product e-commerce, agricultural e-commerce and rural e-commerce, no matter how many fundamental problems are listed, a trust factor can always be identified. Zhang Li believes that if the trust problem is solved, corresponding solutions can be found for the related problems. The fragmentation of agricultural production, processing, transportation and sales in China creates a huge difference between the economic development formats of our entire country and those of developed European countries. Because of this fragmentation, many breakpoints form along the entire chain from primary agricultural production to the dining table. The existence of these breakpoints, or the fermentation of problems arising from them, has caused the entire industrial chain to develop a situation of mutual distrust. This attitude of distrust directly affects the development of the business format, hinders good products from selling well, and leads to a lack of market confidence in purchasing agricultural products of specific quality. Therefore, everyone often finds themselves amid all kinds of rumors about food safety, and many of these rumors are misinformation, innocently passed on to e-commerce businesses and producers.
Producers, operators and consumers must be unified
Guangdong Hemao (Group) Investment Co., Ltd. has long operated as a channel distributor, and its recent plan is to establish 1,000 Hemao Youpin stores nationwide, integrating e-commerce and physical stores into one, creating a genuine O2O model, and unifying producers, the links in between, and final consumers.
Jiang Yatong, chairman of the company, believes that whether physical stores or e-commerce, the final product must bring an experience to consumers. Producers, operators and consumers are all factors concerning the quality of agricultural products. First, producers must guarantee the quality of agricultural products from the source, including soil, water quality, seeds and cultivation. At the circulation level, losses of agricultural products must be reduced to achieve controllable quality.
Jia Ming, co-founder of Benlai Life Network, believes that solving the fragmentation of China's agricultural production currently involves many difficulties. The fragmentation of production has led to a particularly strong sense of distrust and insecurity in the user experience. Another relatively big problem is non-standardization, because agricultural products are non-standard products, which leads to an unstable user experience. Benlai Life Network is promoting upstream enterprises to produce in a standardized way. Through technical means and cultivation methods, it aims to make them standardized.
The terms big data and cloud computing are extremely popular now. Deng Zhongheng, an expert on the Internet of Things and cloud computing for the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, believes that these technologies can be used to help our agriculture and agricultural e-commerce. He believes that the establishment of a credit system is an important part of brand building, and conversely, a brand can also help establish credit. At present, the trust systems related to agriculture in China are traceability systems and tracking systems. If the entire process from production, transportation, processing and sales can be traced from beginning to end, it will be a very important foundation for the trust system, and all trust will come from this.
Zhang Jianshe, vice president of JD Group and director of its Policy Research Office, believes that trust can be divided into negative trust and positive trust. Using big data, the Internet of Things and various kinds of data to help us screen out trustworthy goods is negative trust. JD is trying to establish positive trust from the production and circulation links. There are mainly two links: one is the production system, and the other is the logistics system. The production environment relies on technology to solve the problems we worry about, and a trustworthy logistics system or e-commerce brand will solve the logistics problem.
Start from the two levels of technology and production methods
Zhang Li explained that Europe and the United States achieve trust between consumers and suppliers through control of the entire industrial chain. Trust is a kind of social consciousness, built on the basis of social existence, and that basis of existence is the foundation of our productive forces and production methods. To solve our mode of social existence, Zhang Li believes that two paths must be taken, or at least the problem must be solved from two levels. The first is to solve it at the technical level. China needs to build a trust or traceability system with controls as effective as those of the EU and the United States. On this system, all technical means should be applied, including big data analysis. The trust system is established in order to market agricultural products well, and in the sales process there must be big data support. The second is to work hard, in light of China's agricultural production methods, from the perspective of social organization and management. How to effectively organize fragmented farmers is also a focal point in the trust system. With platform support, the existing production methods must be changed. Some views hold that the recent frequent entry into agriculture by big names from IT, real estate and other industries is not truly engaging in agriculture, but in the commercialization of agriculture, causing agricultural product prices to soar, while farmers do not benefit. In response, Jiang Yatong believes this is a very one-sided understanding. European and American countries also first developed industry, commerce and services, and then used them to give back to agriculture. China's agriculture is no exception; this is a natural law. The core of giving back to agriculture lies in three things: first, capital; second, technology; third, models. Agriculture cannot achieve fully industrialized production. A large amount of idle social funds and industrial and commercial capital entering the agricultural industry, using industrial production methods to integrate agriculture or semi-industrialize it, is in line with a path of agricultural development suited to our own country. Agriculture needs large amounts of capital, technology and models to enter it and to be experimented with and explored.
A farmers' professional cooperative producing tea in Fujian established a traceability system under the guidance of the High-Quality Agriculture Center and the High-Quality Agriculture Association, and now has its own brand. Zhang Li believes that a good product is not merely one that an enterprise or related people say is good, but one that everyone connected to it can confidently say is indeed good. To achieve this, integrated enterprises and farmers must accept third-party supervision, like supervision institutions in the construction industry.
At the same time, there must be social organizations and credible government departments or quasi-government departments to solve some common problems. The association is building a trust system for high-quality agricultural products that advances both online and offline. It serves agricultural product producers, serves e-commerce and even serves the entire circulation chain. Only by gaining everyone's response, understanding and support from production, processing and circulation can we solve the problem that the agricultural industrial chain cannot be controlled throughout the entire process and narrow the gap with developed countries.