Selling fruit via mobile livestream: 2 tons of kiwifruit sold in 4 hours

These past few days, Taobao livestreamed a red-fleshed kiwifruit promotion event, in which two fruit farmers, speaking in thick "Sichuan-accented Mandarin," introduced to netizens what makes their fruit so distinctive. But this livestream was no ordinary corporate marketing exercise; it was a public welfare initiative. These kiwifruits came from Ya'an, an area hit by an earthquake, and helping local farmers sell their products has become a brand-new form of poverty alleviation work.

Chen Puqing and Li Shizhong are the chairmen of two farmers' cooperatives in Jianshan Township, Mingshan District, Ya'an City. Over the past three years, under the guidance of the "deep cultivation of the upstream" strategy of the Shanpin Commune of the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, they have led farmers to grow kiwifruit according to strict standards. According to the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, Shanpin Commune works with fruit farmers to establish cooperatives, provides farmers with professional cultivation guidance and agricultural input subsidies, and purchases products at a price about 40% higher than the market. Farmers in the cooperatives do not have to worry about sales; as long as they focus on growing safe, high-quality agricultural products, Shanpin Commune takes care of connecting with the market and consumers.

In August this year, the Mengding Mountain red-fleshed kiwifruit produced by the cooperatives was sent for testing twice, and both times it passed the safety testing of Intertek, an internationally authoritative third-party safety certification body - 232 pesticide residues and heavy metals were not detected. Because of Ya'an's unique climatic conditions, Mengding Mountain red-fleshed kiwifruit ripens 20 days later than in other production areas, and the fruit is sweeter.

This was Chen Puqing and Li Shizhong's first encounter with online livestreaming. They had no clear idea what livestreaming actually was; they only knew that nearly 100,000 netizens were chatting with them. Chen Puqing and Li Shizhong used their friendly "Sichuan-accented Mandarin" to introduce to netizens the cultivation, selection, and storage methods of Mengding Mountain red-fleshed kiwifruit, as well as the changes that had taken place in the cooperatives over the past few years. During the 4-hour livestream, netizens manually tapped out more than 700,000 likes and cast their consumer votes with practical action for the two middle-aged men. Chen Puqing found it hard to believe that after just chatting for a while, they had unknowingly sold 2 tons of kiwifruit. He said happily that in the past, when the kiwifruit harvest in the village was poor, everyone wore worried expressions, and when the harvest was good, they still could not be happy because they had to rack their brains to sell it all. The most common method was to set up a stall by the roadside. At that time, they could never have imagined there would be this way of selling fruit - relying on just one mobile phone to attract a large number of people to buy.