How are hometown red dates sold across the country? A post-80s mother in Luliang harnesses the internet
Lin County, Luliang City, Shanxi Province, is located in the middle reaches of the Yellow River, on the western side of the Luliang Mountains on the Jinxi Loess Plateau. It covers a total area of 2,979 sq km and has a total population of 600,000, ranking second in Shanxi Province in both area and population. Its Qikou Tourist Area combines Yellow River scenery, local customs, Ming and Qing dynasty architecture, and loess geological landscapes, and is known as a "pearl" in the Jin-Shaan Gorge. Lin County is not only picturesque, but is also the country's largest red date production base, with 630,000 mu of red date forest in the county and an annual output value reaching 120 million jin.
In recent years, driven by the rapid development of local planting techniques, red date output has improved very noticeably, and the county has successfully become China's number one red date county. What worries farmers, however, is that although output has risen, the fluctuating red date market always leaves farmers, after a year of hard work, without a stable income; and farmers who live off the mountains and rivers can only passively wait for sales year after year. However, with the rapid spread of the internet and smartphones in China, young people in the county began to think about selling their own red dates online. Yet because most farmers are relatively unfamiliar with online sales skills, there were very few successful local cases of truly large-scale online sales.
Among this new generation of farmers willing to try new things was a post-80s mother named Zhao Qiaohong. After only a little more than half a year of exploration, she actually succeeded in selling her family's 40,000 to 50,000 jin of red dates to more than a dozen provinces and cities, including Guangdong, Guangxi, Jiangxi, Fujian, Zhejiang, Heilongjiang, and Liaoning. So what exactly did she do in that short half year?
The beauty in the photo is Zhao Qiaohong, a native of Lin County. Like most post-80s people, Zhao Qiaohong had also lived the life of making her way in a big city. But after many years in the clothing business in Xi'an, she decided to return home and start a family. Married life soon became plain, and unwilling to live such a plain life, she conceived the idea of starting a business at home. As it happened, at the end of 2015, the tens of thousands of jin of red dates harvested by her family encountered sluggish sales. Facing this predicament, Zhao Qiaohong thought of using the internet to solve the problem of the red dates at home that could not find a market.
After discussing an initial business plan with her family, Zhao Qiaohong began trying in large numbers the platforms then available, posting red date sales information, including well-known e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba, Taobao, and WeChat. But all things are difficult at the beginning. After a period of trying, although she achieved some results in online sales, for the tens of thousands of jin of red dates in stock at home, such a small transaction volume was only a drop in the bucket.
However, Zhao Qiaohong did not lose heart. She continued actively looking online for opportunities, for online platforms she did not yet know of and had not tried that could broaden the sales channels for her family's red dates. In December 2015, while searching online for red date market conditions, she discovered on a webpage an agricultural products e-commerce platform called Yimutian. Quick-minded, she soon downloaded the app and, as before, posted information about her family's red dates in the app. This time she upgraded the photos of her family's red dates; clearer photos could improve the quality of the product display.
People say persistence always brings rewards, and hard work pays off. After this information was posted, people gradually began calling her to ask about the red dates, and afterward the number of completed transactions also rose noticeably. During this period, unlike the previous small individual purchases, these buyers were all buying in bulk, and she herself went from contacting express delivery to contacting logistics. Moreover, after confirming the quality of Zhao Qiaohong's red dates, many buyers subsequently increased the frequency and quantity of their purchases. Zhao Qiaohong understood that this business was brought to her by the new platform Yimutian, and after that she became even more enthusiastic about using the platform. After several months of effort, she successfully sold out her family's red dates, and thanks to her good reputation, many buyers began conducting online transactions with her without meeting in person. In her words, online escrow transactions are not only convenient but also safer, and at the same time they enhanced her brand effect. She also became a local internet celebrity in red date sales and on the Yimutian platform.
Talking about her experience with the various online platforms currently, Zhao Qiaohong said that compared with other platforms, the Yimutian platform is more professional, and the platform has more precise and trustworthy buyers. Such a precise online trading platform made her entrepreneurial path more calm and confident, and she truly achieved selling her family's red dates nationwide without leaving home. But although her business is getting better and better, Zhao Qiaohong never dares to be careless. She deeply understands one principle: when selling online, integrity is more important than gold. So no matter how large her business grows in the future, she must uphold the principle of integrity without relaxing it, so that she can build her brand into a truly gold-medal supplier. In addition, she also hopes that through her own efforts and the platform's development, thousands of Zhao Qiaohongs can appear in her hometown, freeing hometown farmers from the predicament of a good harvest without good income, and thereby building her hometown into a more beautiful and better place.