How do you open up sales channels for agricultural products? This is how rural treasures can be sold

In the current development of rural e-commerce, many counties have plenty of good products, but in the process of selling agricultural products online, things are not as smooth as imagined. Why? This question now puzzles everyone involved in county-level e-commerce and rural e-commerce. Some experts are even criticizing that when e-commerce goes to the countryside, farmers always buy far more than they sell.

Why is it so difficult to sell agricultural products online through e-commerce?

Is it because Alibaba and JD.com are unwilling to do it? No. I have a view: "Our agriculture is still at the level of the 19th century, while our e-commerce has already entered the 21st century." The two currently cannot join hands. So when "Benxiansheng" sold 600,000 jin of pineapples and still lost badly, we must not judge economic events from a moral standpoint. The fundamental reason is that the standardization of agricultural products, the traceability system for agricultural products, and the degree of trust in the quality of agricultural products are not recognized by e-commerce consumers, so these chaotic situations arise.

How should county-level agricultural product e-commerce be done?

My view is:

First, systematically develop county-level agricultural product e-commerce, bring out your differentiated products, and build your brand. Industrial products have no concept of regional brands, but agricultural products definitely must have one. For example, with refrigerators, what is the difference between buying a refrigerator made in Qingdao and one made in Shenzhen? There is no difference. But when eating crab, you must eat Yangcheng Lake crab, and when drinking Longjing tea, it must be from West Lake. This is the particularity of agricultural products. So the first thing is to establish your own characteristics and highlight your regional brand. Without this brand communication power, then sorry, consumers will not think of buying your things. Just like this audience member who asked the question, I did not remember which county you said just now. If there were a brand, and you said tea from such-and-such county, I might have remembered it.

Second, we must carefully and meticulously cultivate our market brands. All regional brands will ultimately face a tragedy: the "tragedy of the commons." Why? A public pasture will surely have many people grazing on it, leading to its destruction. So when building public brands, you must pay attention to market brands. For example, only a certain brand of Yangcheng Lake hairy crab is real, and only a certain brand of Shaanxi apples is safe to eat. Therefore, agricultural product brands show a unique dual-brand system.

Third, we must vigorously promote the internetization of agriculture. To do agricultural product e-commerce now, we must pursue the internetization of agriculture, which is what Director Song Hongyuan just called "Internet Plus" agriculture. If agriculture is not strong, your agricultural product e-commerce will definitely not get through. Building a tall building on sand will definitely be unstable. For "Internet Plus" agriculture, there is too much transformation work. Now we must do it with dedication, otherwise in the end a situation will arise where the head of the commerce bureau's fate is tied to the neck of the head of the agriculture bureau. If the head of the agriculture bureau is not strong, the head of the commerce bureau will suffer greatly. What should be done about this? It should be a top-leader project, comprehensively and systematically doing the basic work of county-level agricultural product e-commerce. This takes time and requires the participation of a large number of enterprises, platforms, entrepreneurs, and farmers. On this issue, my view, to say something no one likes to hear, is that it will be very difficult for the problems of agricultural product e-commerce to be thoroughly resolved within three to five years. It will certainly be a long process, involving the transformation of the way of life and production formed in our agriculture over more than 2,000 years, and it will certainly be a long process.

What should entrepreneurs in agricultural product e-commerce do?

Get into the right posture for agricultural product e-commerce entrepreneurship. Many young people return to their hometowns and find that everything at home is agricultural products. They want to sell them online, and even want to integrate all the local agricultural products. Is this easy to do?

On this issue, let me say two blunt things. Because of the Communist Youth League, I now receive messages almost every day on Weibo and WeChat, and people even come to my office to ask me about agricultural product e-commerce entrepreneurship. Let me tell everyone some truths. Although the opportunities are good, opportunity does not necessarily belong to you. There is contingency within necessity. Young man who asked the question, you just said that Shouguang has many vegetable agricultural products, but not all agricultural products can get on the train of the internet. This is the first point.

Second, not all agricultural products need to travel outside the city, outside the province, or outside the municipality. I want to tell everyone a view: more than 80% of agricultural products are consumed locally. So if you fantasize about putting all the agricultural products of every county on the internet and selling them to all of China and the whole world, this itself is a wrong way of thinking, and you definitely cannot do it. So why do we now talk about agricultural product O2O? Why talk about O2O? Because we have discovered this misunderstanding.

Third, doing e-commerce for agricultural products, especially fresh products, has its own insurmountable shortcomings. First, they are especially bulky, with terribly expensive logistics costs. Second, preservation is especially difficult. For example, the hardest thing to solve is preserving green leafy vegetables; even SF Express cannot do it. They can neither wilt nor turn yellow. Who can solve this? It is very difficult. Third, standardization is very difficult. Watermelons and melons from Zhang San's and Li Si's families mixed together can easily lead to this: with the first bite, it is very much like what you advertised, as sweet as Yang Yuying, reminding people of a sweet-and-sour beautiful first love; with the second bite, what taste is this, you want to throw it away, negative review. So fresh agricultural products have their own problems.

How can you sell the good products from your village?

First, many things such as vegetables are not only sold through online retail, but can also be sold wholesale. Wholesale is not only offline; it also exists online.

Second, when you start selling, do not think about integrating all your local agricultural products. When you stuff so many agricultural products into one Taobao store or one online shop, when others look at your store, it is "completely confusing," and instead it blurs your impression. Everyone does not know what you are doing.

The third problem this brings is that after integrating many agricultural products, your supply chain and industrial chain control capabilities do not match, and you are very likely to run into problems.

So my suggestions are: first, take out one thing suitable for going online, try it first, test the waters, and proceed step by step; second, you must have a team. Agricultural product e-commerce is relatively complex, and you cannot do it without three to five solid close buddies; third, it is best to match the government's e-commerce planning policies. If Shouguang is heading east and you personally head west, you will definitely not get the sunshine of policy, so you should go back and discuss it again with your team.