Two major pain points in leisure agriculture e-commerce urgently need to be addressed

At present, various regions are actively promoting the integrated development of leisure agriculture and e-commerce, and have established a number of leisure agriculture e-commerce platforms. Some are explored through the practical efforts of operators, some are led and built by administrative institutions, and some are invested in and developed by social capital. Platforms of different models are emerging one after another, and their functions are also constantly innovating. But on the whole, leisure agriculture e-commerce platforms face two major pain points in the development process: function and operation. If these can be resolved and a long-term mechanism for optimizing platform development can be established, their role in promoting the development of leisure agriculture will become even more prominent.

First, the functional pain point: it is difficult to construct a tourism image. Tourism image is tourists' perception of and emotional evaluation of the various attributes of a tourist destination. It can construct the experience that tourists expect to gain from it, thereby stimulating tourism motivation. Leisure agriculture is a tourism product with distinctive features that is "diversified and personalized." According to Urry's classification of the tourist gaze, the "romantic gaze" is an important experiential attribute of leisure agriculture. Immersing oneself in the tourism environment and obtaining a solitary, private and spiritual experience with the tourism product is where the value of leisure agriculture lies. Therefore, only by enabling tourists to construct a tourism image with a "romantic gaze" can their motivation to experience leisure agriculture be stimulated.

At present, most leisure agriculture e-commerce platforms mainly convey information such as the name, location, price and program content of products. However, due to the product characteristics of leisure agriculture, before making travel decisions, tourists need to know whether the product can satisfy the experiential needs they require. This requires the platform to provide more text, pictures, and even music and video that help construct a tourism image, and to highlight the spiritual feeling of the core product. But for ease of operation and management, platforms often set standard modules, and merchants can only introduce according to content templates, which conceals the distinctive differences among products, resulting in content that is not sufficiently appealing and cannot move tourists. Therefore, leisure agriculture e-commerce platforms can let tourists know about products, but cannot construct an image that stimulates tourists' tourism motivation, causing their function to be greatly reduced.

Second, the operational pain point: high publicity and operation costs. The Internet has a "Matthew effect," and the traffic of e-commerce platforms is often concentrated on a few large platforms. Later entrants, even if they have greatly improved their technical level or user experience, still need to invest a large amount of publicity funds to "stick" consumers. In addition, merchants with strength can gain greater market influence in online communication. For example, on the Taobao e-commerce platform, a small number of large merchants occupy the vast majority of transaction share. But for industry vertical e-commerce platforms, their target group needs to include operators across the entire industry. The platform must not only pay attention to merchants with a large market share, but also help merchants with a small market share operate on the platform. However, such merchants often are numerous, have little traffic and face high operating costs.

Leisure agriculture e-commerce platforms face particularly prominent difficulties in this regard. First, compared with consumer products such as clothing, food, housing and transportation, and even within the tourism industry, leisure agriculture has relatively little influence, and the platform needs strong publicity and promotion to gain long-term market attention. Second, leisure agriculture operators are mainly rural operators, whose ability to use the Internet is insufficient and who often need guidance and help. In addition, the degree of product standardization is low and service quality is generally not high, which easily triggers tourist complaints and increases the platform's operating costs. Third, the overall profit level of the leisure agriculture industry is not high, which is insufficient to support a high-cost publicity and promotion model and limits innovation in the platform's model.

Pain points are the basis of product innovation. As an industry vertical e-commerce platform, the leisure agriculture e-commerce platform should improve service efficiency in terms of function, build a bridge for constructing a tourism image between supply and demand sides, and improve content quality. In terms of operation, it should fully rely on existing resources, mobilize the enthusiasm of market entities to participate in platform construction, reduce operating costs, and establish a mechanism for the platform's long-term sustainable operation.

First, build an open platform. A bridge is the essential function of an e-commerce platform. An e-commerce platform should realize not only information interaction between merchants and tourists, but also information interaction among tourists. On the one hand, the platform should enrich communication methods, take facilitating the construction of a tourism image as the core of its functional design, enable merchants to convey promotional content rich in emotional expression, and enhance the experiential nature of information. On the other hand, it should open the evaluation function so that every tourist has the possibility to participate in communication, and enhance the communication effect through these personalized and popular comment expressions.

Second, realize the sharing of publicity resources. Content is the core value of an e-commerce platform. Leisure agriculture merchants carry out publicity through self-media or public media and have formed quite a lot of high-quality publicity content. The platform should use technical means to absorb existing publicity achievements so that these abundant resources can be reused on the platform. In this way, it can not only quickly enrich the platform's content and improve content quality, but also reduce the cost for merchants to join the platform.

Third, explore customer diversion models. Customers are the vitality of an e-commerce platform. Most leisure agriculture products have already accumulated a certain customer group. Leisure agriculture e-commerce platforms should explore reasonable mechanisms to encourage merchants to attract the customers they have to the platform, realizing customer diversion from small platforms to a large platform. In this way, the platform can find target customers in the short term at a relatively low cost and expand the platform's influence.

Fourth, establish a credit guarantee mechanism. Trust is the key advantage of an e-commerce platform. Leisure agriculture e-commerce platforms can promote the joint development of products by developing a credit guarantee function. Through credit guarantees provided by products with great market influence and high recognition, distinctive new products can be brought to market awareness. In addition, joint promotion of high-quality products can also be realized, and through credit guarantee signals, the market recognition of high-quality products can be further enhanced.