The community-based agricultural input e-commerce model is worth trying

Agricultural input e-commerce has been surging for more than a year. From the initial excitement of riding the "Internet Plus" wave to the embarrassment of being difficult to implement, many people in the industry have begun to reconsider the value and implementation path of agricultural input e-commerce. When it comes to the pain points of implementing agricultural input e-commerce, opinions vary from person to person, so I will not elaborate here. I only want to return to the starting point of agricultural input e-commerce and explore whether another possibility exists.

From the current situation, agricultural input e-commerce basically starts from the upstream of the agricultural input industry chain, such as production enterprises or distribution platforms, or other e-commerce platforms crossing over to grab a share of the pie. These entities share one thing in common: because they are too far from the fields and farmers, both physically and psychologically, they design and operate agricultural input e-commerce with the habitual thinking of internet elites, and the result of not being grounded is naturally predictable.

From Wu Di and his college student startup team, we see a reverse-thinking operating model. As village-level agricultural input retailers, as the final end of the agricultural input industry chain, they have capital, understand agricultural technology, and handle deliveries. More importantly, through long-term interaction with those they serve, they have built credit guarantees among fellow villagers and neighbors, so farmers naturally trust them for purchases and rely on them for convenience. When Wu Di and others serve as the initiators of agricultural input e-commerce, simply from the perspective of implementation, they possess advantages that other e-commerce platforms cannot match.

Of course, compared with the large-scale deployment of e-commerce platforms, the coverage of Wu Di and others cannot be mentioned in the same breath, but it is precisely this that forms a unique "community-based agricultural input e-commerce" model. Within their service scope, all are loyal customers of previous agricultural input physical stores. At this time, the e-commerce platform mainly takes on a tool attribute: when they need to buy fertilizer or pesticides, they simply enter the brand and variety on their phones and wait for delivery; when they need technical services, they upload images of diseases, and experts diagnose online and deliver medicine to their door. "Internet Plus agricultural inputs" has in turn become "agricultural inputs plus the internet," making products and technical services more targeted and more convenient.

"Community-based" also creates another possibility, namely closer interaction and a better user experience, and this is precisely one of the core concepts of internet thinking. For those farmers with lower education levels and unfamiliarity with mobile phone operation, Wu Di and his team adopted call contact devices, just like community hospitals' medical services for the elderly. When encountering field diseases and other situations, they only need to press a button, and agricultural technology experts immediately locate them and provide door-to-door service. Combined with offline promotion tools such as observation meetings, on the one hand they use comparative effects to strengthen the quality of products and technical services, and on the other hand, through exchanges among farmers in the same community, they further optimize farmers' sense of identity and customer experience.

Because the strong regional nature of agricultural production determines regional differences in agricultural input products and technical service content, this makes the community-based agricultural input e-commerce model more replicable. From the practice of Wu Di and others, community-based agricultural input e-commerce can also play a considerable role in the standardization of agricultural production. It is suggested that relevant departments consider using them as the implementing body for certain projects (such as the "Agricultural Maker Action"), build entrepreneurship platforms, attract more college students to rural areas for entrepreneurial development, strengthen the team of new-type professional farmers, and provide talent support for modern agricultural development and new rural construction.