The Story of Luo Rong, E-commerce Manager of Shengqiao Village
Luo Rong is a university graduate village official in Shengqiao Village, Shengqiao Town, Taizhou City, Jiangsu Province. In everyone's eyes, she is a person who loves to stir things up; as long as it is related to entrepreneurship, she is interested, and as long as an activity can motivate the people around her to take action, she participates.
Seizing the Opportunity to Test the Waters of the E-commerce Tide
In 2013, Luo Rong participated in the closed-door training held by the Entrepreneurship Academy for University Graduate Village Officials organized by the Organization Department of the Taizhou Municipal Party Committee. After listening to the wonderful lecture by Wang Xiaojian, a lecturer from Taobao University, Luo Rong, as a new mother, came up with the idea of opening a maternal and infant clothing online store. On October 11, the Taobao store was officially launched, and Luo Rong transformed from a veteran Taobao buyer into a Taobao seller, becoming a "manager."
At the beginning, due to large capital investment, a limited range of styles, serious inventory buildup, and low website traffic, there were only two or three orders a month. In view of this situation, she began to consider how to choose products that were competitive and required relatively small investment. Taking advantage of her relative's job at an international trading company in New Zealand, she switched to purchasing infant formula on behalf of customers. After more than two years of hustling, relying on the price advantage of first-hand supply and the quality guarantee of authentic place of origin, she won more and more customers, and business got better and better. Now the proportion of her customers coming through "old customers bringing new ones" has reached 75%.
Digging Deep into Resources to Open Up Sales Markets
The Taobao store was a success, but Luo Rong was not satisfied with just that, because the products sold on Taobao had nothing to do with the agriculture of Shengqiao Village. Luo Rong thought of the Luzhiyuan Vegetable Planting Professional Cooperative in Shengqiao Village, which had a greenhouse vegetable area of more than 300 mu. Each year, the melons, fruits, and vegetables it produced were basically collected by vegetable vendors, or sold through vegetable markets and supermarkets, and had never touched the internet.
In 2015, the cooperative's watermelons came onto the market in large quantities. As a "classic variety 8424" among watermelons, they had always been very popular in the market, but because sales channels were blocked, they could only be limited to wholesale by melon vendors, resulting in middlemen profiting while melon farmers earned meager incomes. After discovering this situation, Luo Rong posted real-time information about the watermelons produced by the Luzhiyuan Vegetable Planting Professional Cooperative online. In June of that same year alone, she used the internet to help the cooperative sell more than 10,000 jin of "8424" watermelons worth 150,000 yuan, solving the melon farmers' sales problem and increasing the added value of agricultural products. While astonishing the cooperative's growers, she also let them feel the charm of online sales and boosted local people's confidence in participating in agricultural e-commerce.
Selling agricultural products online is not an easy task. After selling watermelons for a month, Luo Rong's skin was tanned almost as dark as the melon farmers'. The process of selling watermelons was not all smooth sailing either. During delivery, because the watermelons were very fresh, they were prone to bursting open when jolted around. In order not to affect her credibility with customers, she bore all these losses personally and persisted in selling watermelons online. She said that discussing physical sales and online market conditions with melon farmers on the field ridges is a happy thing, and being able to help the cooperative sell agricultural and sideline products through the internet is even more a matter of realizing personal value.
Leading by Example to Drive Mass Entrepreneurship
Luo Rong was a pioneer in entrepreneurship, but she did not leave her colleagues behind. Instead, she actively encouraged the university graduate village officials around her to also join the e-commerce entrepreneurship tide, which required small investment and brought quick results.
Qiu Ting, a university graduate village official in Shuangxing Village, was precisely under Luo Rong's influence when she also opened a store on Taobao selling agricultural and sideline products, helping farmers in Shengqiao Village sell more than 800 crabs and more than 6,000 grass eggs in 2015. Shen Lingling of Fengzhuang Village and Chen Ting of Wanzhong Village also actively followed Luo Rong in posting information about Shengqiao Village's green agricultural and sideline products online. They said that in doing so, they not only learned e-commerce knowledge and trained themselves, but also promoted Shengqiao Village to the outside world.
Some villagers of Shengqiao Village also caught the ride of the internet under Luo Rong's leadership. Chen Yongjun, a greenhouse vegetable grower, under Luo Rong's influence, began using QQ and WeChat, learned to post information online about strawberries, tomatoes, and other melons and fruits, sold homemade strawberry jam and tomato sauce, and invited online customers to come to the greenhouses to experience picking. Sun Fei, owner of the Hantu Family Farm, newly created a WeChat public account and made a QR code, promptly posting farm information online and selling ecological fish and rice online, and obtained very good returns. Now, enterprises in the Shengqiao Agricultural Park such as the Xinshengyuan Egg Products Factory, the Santai Pickle Factory, and the Heheng Poultry and Egg Professional Cooperative have also started online sales.
Luo Rong is currently thinking about joining forces with the university graduate village officials of Shengqiao Village to start a business together, so that more agricultural products can catch the ride of Internet Plus and create the university graduate village officials' own e-commerce brand.
Yan Guizhu