Analysis of the Pain Points of Tea E-commerce, Farmers' Tea Market Online Initiative Launched

China is a major tea country, but that does not mean it is a tea powerhouse. Although there are a great many tea enterprises, most are confined to their own regions, and there are very few enterprises and brands with truly significant influence at home and abroad. At present, the development of China's tea industry has entered a period of deep adjustment. With the arrival of the information age, under the influence of the wave of the digital information revolution, traditional enterprises, or rather traditional thinking, have all begun to take the internet as their context, using internet thinking to reconstruct and reinvent themselves. The tea industry is certainly no exception.

　　The Tea Industry: China's March Toward Becoming a Tea Powerhouse

Tea originated in China, and tea drinking also began in China. According to the "Report on Production and Sales Demand and Investment Forecast Analysis of China's Tea Industry" by the Qianzhan Industry Research Institute, by the end of 2015, China's tea plantation area had reached 43.16 million mu, with more than 200,000 tea enterprises, more than 30 million tea farmers, and a comprehensive output value estimated at 307.8 billion yuan. In just the one year from 2014 to 2015, China added 1.75 million mu of tea plantations. The ever-increasing scale of the tea industry has been expanding by inertia, yet tea consumption cannot keep up with production, and the contradiction between supply and demand has led to accumulating inventory at some representative wholesale markets in China.

Against the national backdrop of actively promoting "Internet Plus," the tea industry is also actively exploring how to expand diversified sales channels and promotion platforms. Due to the particular nature of tea, in nearly a decade of efforts to bring tea online, there have been few successes.

　　Tea E-commerce Encounters a Market Bottleneck

First, because there are so many categories of Chinese tea, consumers tend to remember the category rather than the brand, and brand loyalty is virtually zero. This creates the biggest problem facing tea e-commerce: user stickiness is far too weak.

Second, tea has a very distinct characteristic of experiential consumption. The consumption pattern is always to taste first and buy afterward; through the process of tasting, one determines whether one likes a particular tea and then decides to buy. E-commerce cannot provide this kind of in-depth experience, which gives consumers a sense of uncertainty.

Third, there is a mismatch in consumer groups. Online consumers are mostly young consumers under the age of 35, who pay more attention to needs such as speed, simplicity, fashion and convenience, and do not have overly strict requirements regarding the quality of tea.

The Chinese tea world is also gradually exploring and improving the consumer structure of Chinese tea brands, and is attempting to enter the living space of young consumers at home and abroad in a more direct and deeper way, in order to capture the future consumer market.

In 2016, a tea brand called "Try" (meaning "to taste") appeared on the tea market, targeting young consumers. Its brand name embodies the coordinated expression characteristic of English and Chinese, and its brand meaning of "trying" also reflects the brand's convergent understanding of young people's mainstream consciousness and behavioral patterns, as well as its brand philosophy in response.

It can thus be seen that the internet economy is the field with the greatest growth potential for the future, and China is a major country in both tea production and tea consumption, with high consumption frequency, prominent scale effects and enormous industry prospects.