How Rural "E-Commerce Assistants" Master Double 11
Reading note: Rural e-commerce has increasingly become a highlight of "Double 11." Not only is the upward flow of agricultural products enriching the e-commerce market, but the huge consumption potential in rural areas has also become a main battlefield enlivening "Double 11." How can e-commerce platforms better serve rural consumer groups, and how can "e-commerce assistants" from rural areas better respond to the opportunities brought by e-commerce development? Please see the report sent back by our newspaper's reporter from e-commerce-developed Zhejiang --
The carnival of "Double 11" is increasingly no longer only for cities. As e-commerce fully penetrates rural areas, faced with the super temptation of shopping, farmers are also eagerly looking forward early, waiting for the bell to ring in the early hours of November 11, ready to "go all out."
But rural areas are different from cities. For farmers, besides enjoying the same convenient and ultra-value shopping experience as city residents, what is more important is how to use e-commerce platforms to open sales channels for agricultural products, promote product brands, and achieve premium sales. For traditional agriculture, the bigger question is how, by "going online," to better complete the transformation of the supply chain so as to connect with the huge consumer market.
With these questions, the reporter conducted in-depth interviews, trying to interpret the deeper meaning of this upcoming grand event for rural e-commerce from the perspectives of Alibaba's rural Taobao strategy, a rural Taobao partner, and more agricultural product e-commerce operators.
Rural Taobao Stations: Smart Countryside Starts Here
As the creator of "Double 11," Alibaba is undoubtedly the biggest focus. In September 2014, after Alibaba listed in the United States, it formally made agriculture-related e-commerce one of its three major future strategies. Soon after, Alibaba announced the launch of the "Thousand Counties and Ten Thousand Villages Plan," planning to invest 10 billion yuan over the next 3 to 5 years to establish 1,000 county-level service centers and 100,000 village-level service stations.
In terms of the specific model, Alibaba, by building a two-tier service network at the county and village levels, gives play to the advantages of e-commerce, breaks through the bottlenecks of logistics and information flow and the shortcomings in talent and awareness, and creates a two-way circulation function of "online goods going to the countryside" and "agricultural products entering the cities." Of course, the first step of the entire project is purchasing on behalf of rural residents.
After two years of development, as of August this year, Rural Taobao had established a presence in 29 provinces nationwide, and the number of Rural Taobao partners and Taobao helpers had reached nearly 20,000. The reporter learned through interviews that in this year's "Double 11," Rural Taobao is also participating simultaneously. For many merchants who have just joined the Rural Taobao platform, this is mostly their first time and is clearly a tough battle.
On October 13, at the "2016 County Ecological E-Commerce Festival and Double 11 Rural E-Commerce Expo" held in Hefei, Anhui, Sun Lijun, vice president of Alibaba and general manager of the Rural Taobao business unit, said that this year's Rural Taobao "Double 11" would focus with participating merchants on penetrating the rural market through services. "In the previous Rural Taobao 2.0 strategy, we and the merchants were mostly thinking about selling goods. But in the 3.0 strategy, service will be a core part of merchants' upgrading."
The reporter learned during an interview at Alibaba that, unlike last year, after Rural Taobao upgraded to the "3.0 strategy" this year, it will lay out "Double 11" around the new "three centers," namely the ecological service center, the entrepreneurship incubation center and the cultural public welfare center, and the role of the entire Rural Taobao partner will also change from entrepreneur to rural service provider.
How exactly will it change? For example, Rural Taobao stations will no longer simply shop and sell goods, but will connect to all of Alibaba's resources, from e-commerce, finance, medical care and education to culture and entertainment, allowing farmers to enjoy the smart rural services brought by the internet, through which Alibaba can obtain more rural big data. For another example, in the future, with Rural Taobao stations as the core, more merchants doing local services will be incubated, as well as stores expanding the upward flow of agricultural products and industrial products.
According to the introduction, today the entire downward logistics cost of Alibaba Rural Taobao has been effectively compressed, and this reduction in cost will drive the upward flow of more agricultural products. At present, the Rural Taobao team is relying on Alibaba's retail platform and the Rural Taobao Xiangtian channel to carry out upward-flow work. At the same time, when regional agricultural products reach a certain scale, bulk purchasing and wholesale will be realized through the 1688 platform.
Wu Yanfeng: A New-Style Rural Entrepreneur
November 1 is also called "Mini Singles' Day" in the online world. For Wu Yanfeng, the rural shopping carnival she leads truly begins on this day and will continue until the end of "Double 11." That day, in the square of Wuzhai Village, Zhongshan Township, Tonglu, Zhejiang, a convertible car served as a stage, and Wu Yanfeng strained her voice to promote products such as warm shoes and cotton-padded clothes.
Tonglu is where Alibaba Rural Taobao established its first county-level service center, and it now has more than 220 Rural Taobao stations. As "Double 11" approaches, under the organization of the county-level service center, all Rural Taobao partners are going all out. According to the plan, from October 21 to 31, the main work is preliminary household surveys of villagers' needs; from November 1 to 10, in-stock sales begin, with some goods sold by presale; and by the 11th, everything is fully opened, and as in the cities, orders must be placed to snap up goods.
"In terms of time, this rural shopping carnival lasts longer than in the city, with more promotion methods and more excitement." Sure enough, in the following week, Wu Yanfeng would form a "six-person squad" with partners from several nearby Rural Taobao stations, taking turns going to various villages for exhibitions and sales. "Each of us partners has dozens of samples on hand, and put together they are quite abundant."
The convertible cars are uniformly distributed by the county-level service center. In Tonglu, there are nearly 20 such squads, each with one car. How exactly to shout out promotions? Everyone uses their own methods, whether playing games or giving out perks; in short, they use every trick they have. In the past, this group did not know how to promote, but now, after being tempered, every one of them has become a "marketing master."
Last year during "Double 11," Wu Yanfeng sold more than 800,000 yuan worth of goods in total. Surprisingly, she actually sold 3 cars. How did she do it? Wu Yanfeng's secret lies in grasping farmers' needs and providing good supporting services. So this year, long before, Wu Yanfeng began going from household to household, handing out flyers and filling out questionnaires. She starts at 3 p.m. every day and continues until eight or nine at night.
Where does Wu Yanfeng get so much creativity and energy? You might think she must be a young woman. But when the reporter asked, she was already nearly 50, and before doing Rural Taobao in 2014, she did not even know how to use a computer, a pure "online shopping novice." It is precisely her willingness to endure hardship and her love of learning that made Wu Yanfeng a "Rural Taobao expert." Now every month, her Rural Taobao station's sales are more than 50,000 yuan. On November 1 alone, Wu Yanfeng presold 20 home appliances.
Wu Yanfeng said that since the arrival of Rural Taobao stations, people's e-commerce awareness has grown stronger and stronger, and where there is buying, there is selling. Now, many farmers proactively come to ask whether they can also sell online the agricultural products their own families cannot finish eating. Tang Zhongqiang, head of the Tonglu county-level service center of Rural Taobao, told the reporter that they are embedding "community functions" to realize online trading of local agricultural products.
Agricultural Product Sellers: The Bigger the Market, the Bigger the Challenge
The reporter learned that during "Double 11," many agricultural product sellers are not particularly "enthusiastic," because the explosion of logistics volume is an enormous challenge for fresh agricultural products. Moreover, many sellers also admit that today the Taobao platform has set higher and higher thresholds for selling agricultural products, and many large-scale upward-flow operations can only be completed when the platform directly reaches into the front-end supply chain and provides support such as traffic.
As a result, many sellers have now shifted their energy to the increasingly rising WeChat business. Today, this "ant army" of WeChat groups also has strength that cannot be underestimated. During "Double 11," many lightly processed agricultural products with low logistics requirements are also beginning to stand out. Merchants are all preparing to "cash in" during the carnival.
Ma Gongzuo, a young man born after 1985, is one of them. After graduating from university, Xiao Ma did clothing Taobao in Hangzhou for two years. Seeing that the honey at home was hard to sell, he returned to Hengzhang Village, Dadongba Town, Songyang County, and began helping his father sell honey online. His approach is: through WeChat, livestream the entire process of beekeeping and honey harvesting online, letting consumers see clearly where the wild honey comes from and how it tastes.