Cherries and pineapples are both fruits, so why are their fates so different?

Recently, the "rotten pineapple" incident in Xuwen County, Guangdong, caused quite a stir. The Tmall e-commerce store "Benxiansheng" helped sell off the backlog of unsellable pineapples in Xuwen County, Guangdong, but due to simple packaging, overly long transport times and other reasons, the pineapples rotted, and the store nearly suffered a loss.

In sharp contrast, seasonal fruits such as cherries and lychees were in short supply, with excellent online sales feedback, and e-commerce sellers competed for supply.

They are all fruits, so why do e-commerce sales of pineapples and cherries produce completely different outcomes?

Cherries: harvested after orders are placed, shipped directly by air

April and May are the ripening season for cherries. Unlike most other fruits, which are mostly sold through physical retail stores, cherries have astonishingly high sales on e-commerce platforms, and most of these cherries come from Yantai, Shandong. It is reported that 25% of Yantai cherries are currently sold through e-commerce.

The biggest difficulty for fresh-food e-commerce at present is cold-chain storage and transport, and cherries, as a fruit that keeps for 3-4 days at room temperature and one week when refrigerated, have absolutely no advantage when it comes to shelf life.

In response, the approach of local cherry growers in Yantai is to use air transport, picking immediately after receiving orders, then delivering them to consumers by air in 1-2 days, so they fall exactly within the cherry's four-day freshness period. At present, temperatures in most parts of the country are still below 30°C, so cold-chain transport is not even needed.

On the other hand, because cooperation has already been established with fresh-food e-commerce platforms such as Tmall and JD.com, many cherries are sold by pre-sale, with orders already sold through e-commerce before the ripening season. If, after picking, they were traded as spot goods with retailers, losses would instead increase, because cherries, as a seasonal fruit, all come onto the market in concentrated fashion within a short period. If they do not go through e-commerce channels, large amounts of inventory will be squeezed with no buyers to be found.

Pineapples: blindly using e-commerce channels leads to losing everything

Whether cherries or lychees, they have already cooperated many times with e-commerce platforms and express delivery companies, and have formed their own set of picking, transport and service plans. The pineapple incident in Xuwen County, however, was lost because of blindly using e-commerce channels to sell without understanding the local situation.

This year, pineapples in Xuwen County, Guangdong, were unsalable, and some media reports said "not a single buyer even at one mao per jin." So a Tmall flagship store called "Benxiansheng" purchased more than 600,000 jin of local pineapples to sell on Tmall, at 29.9 yuan for ten jin with free shipping. The original intention was kindly meant to help farmers clear inventory, but because the packaging was too crude and the transport period too long, customers reported after receiving the goods that the pineapples were basically all spoiled, so the store ultimately chose to remove all products and shut down.

The fundamental reason for this outcome is still that Xuwen County currently does not have the conditions for doing fresh-food e-commerce. It is reported that locally there is currently no good packaging factory, and coordination with express delivery and e-commerce is basically nonexistent. Therefore, this Tmall flagship store did not directly sign contracts with local farmers, but instead purchased from the spot market. The fruit was already highly ripe, and then it was transported back, packed and sent by express, and then transported to customers. For fresh-food e-commerce, this transport cycle was simply too long. Moreover, because pineapples are very bulky and consume a lot of packing materials, if one is unwilling to invest in cardboard boxes, they will only rot faster. This is also the reason that led to the failure of this flagship store, which had good intentions but lost everything.