Why is it so hard to sell agricultural products online? An analysis of the main difficulties
In the current development of rural e-commerce, many counties, especially counties in the west, have a great many good things, but the process of selling agricultural products online is not as smooth as one might imagine. Why? Everyone now working in county-level e-commerce and rural e-commerce is puzzled by this question. Some experts are even criticizing the fact that when e-commerce goes to the countryside, farmers always buy far more than they sell.
Why is it so hard 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 taken the lead into the 21st century." The two of them simply cannot hold hands right now. So when "Ben Xiansheng" sold 600,000 jin of pineapples and still lost everything, we must not judge an economic event from a moral standpoint. The root cause is that the standardization of agricultural products, the traceability system for agricultural products, and the level of trust in the quality of agricultural products are not recognized by e-commerce consumers, and that is why these chaotic situations arise.
How should county-level agricultural product e-commerce be done?
My view is this:
First, systematically develop county-level agricultural product e-commerce, bring out your differentiated things, and make your brand known. Industrial products have no concept of a regional brand, but agricultural products absolutely must have one. Take refrigerators, for example: what is the difference between buying a refrigerator made in Qingdao and one made in Shenzhen? No difference. But when eating crab, you must eat the one from Yangcheng Lake, and when drinking Longjing tea, it must be from West Lake. This is the special nature of agricultural products. So the first thing is to bring out your own characteristics and show off your regional brand. Without that brand communication power, then sorry, consumers will not think of buying your things. Just like the audience member who asked the question here, I did not remember which county you said you were from when you introduced yourself just now. If there were a brand, if you had said which county and which tea, I might have remembered.
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 publicly owned pasture will surely have too many people grazing on it, leading to its destruction. So when building a public brand, we must pay attention to the market brand. For example, a certain brand of Yangcheng Lake hairy crab is the real one, and a certain brand of Shaanxi apples is the one you can eat with confidence. Therefore, agricultural product brands display a unique dual-brand system.
Third, we must vigorously advance the internetization of agriculture. To do agricultural product e-commerce now, we must advance 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 not be stable. For "Internet Plus" agriculture, there is far too much renovation work to do. Now we must do it with real care, otherwise in the end a situation will arise in which the head of the commerce bureau is tied to the neck of the agriculture bureau director: if the agriculture bureau director is not strong, the commerce bureau director 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 it requires the joint participation of a large number of enterprises, platforms, entrepreneurs, and farmers. On this issue, my view, and I will say something people may not like to hear, is that the problems of agricultural product e-commerce will be very difficult to resolve thoroughly within three to five years. It will certainly be a very long process, involving the transformation of the ways of life and production formed in our agriculture over more than 2,000 years, and it will certainly be a long process.
What should agricultural product e-commerce entrepreneurs do?
Get into the right posture for agricultural product e-commerce entrepreneurship. Many young people go back 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 question, 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 truth: although the opportunities are very good, it does not necessarily follow that the opportunity belongs to you; this is the contingency within necessity. The handsome young man who asked the question, you just said that Shouguang has many vegetables and agricultural products, but not all agricultural products can board 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 onto the internet and selling them to all of China and the whole world, that itself is a wrong line of thinking, and you will definitely not be able to 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 logistics fees that are expensive to death. Second, keeping them fresh is especially difficult. For example, the hardest thing to solve is keeping green leafy vegetables fresh; even SF Express cannot do it. They can be neither wilted nor yellowed. Who will solve this? It is very hard. Third, standardization is very difficult. Watermelons and melons from Zhang San's and Li Si's families get mixed together, and it is very easy for this to happen: the first bite is very much like what you advertised, as sweet as Yang Yuying, reminding people of a sweet-and-sour beautiful first love; the second bite tastes like, what flavor 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; they can also be sold wholesale, and wholesale is not only offline, it also exists online.
Second, when you first start selling, do not think about integrating all the 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 called "not knowing what you are talking about," and instead it blurs your impression; people do not know what you do.
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 prone to 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 without three to five rock-solid buddies you cannot do it; 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 go back and discuss it again with your team. The author says: On May 25, 2016, the Third China County E-Commerce Summit was held in Shouguang City, Shandong Province. I was invited to participate in the keynote dialogue session of the conference and put forward my own views on issues related to county e-commerce development. This article is part of the on-site Q&A.