​Is it difficult to start a business in rural e-commerce? So what is the development trend?

How to start a rural e-commerce business?

When talking about agriculture, you cannot live without the countryside. At this stage, farmers are the main body of the countryside. However: the distribution of agricultural population is not centralized and the correlation is loose, resulting in huge differences in demand and the loss of the advantage of unified provision of resources to reduce costs. Rural areas continue to move closer to urban areas and obtain marketing channels and resources from urban areas. How to start a rural e-commerce business like that ? So what about the development trend?

1. The ground-based promotion has a long way to go

Whether it is to make SaaS service products that are toB (specifically targeted for enterprises), or e-commerce platforms and 020 platforms specifically targeted in rural areas, ground promotion is undoubtedly one of the biggest costs, and in addition to the closest service cost.

The ground promotion staff have high execution costs and it is not simply that you can get it by sending a few leaflets in the village. Many times, market staff must personally train your users one-on-one (the reason depends on the overall target user's poor network concept and average ability to get started with new things).

Therefore, many ground promotion staff also need to take into account customer training and technical services, and are well known as "consultant marketing".

Many e-commerce companiesThe giants create rural service points in each county and recruit rural promoters based on townships to cover the area with points. To ensure that large-scale users are covered, these early investment costs are unbearable to ordinary entrepreneurs.

Therefore, the common solution for agricultural Internet platforms is: to integrate the current resources by using regional franchise and division into cooperation . There is a long way to go in the ground.

2. It is very important to be down-to-earth!

When starting a business in the agricultural and animal husbandry Internet industry, there must be someone or a few people in the team who have a very good understanding of this field and cannot understand the agricultural and animal husbandry needs in a way that the outside world understands it.

Having such a team partner will be clear about the pitfalls and will help you bypass many pitfalls. In many processes, whether investors or founders do not understand the agricultural and animal husbandry field, they all think and think a lot; only during the process of doing it is discovered that they have made the last mess.

实际上双眼见到的农村、农牧业，听到的需求，很有可能和具体情况有所不同。自已构建了1个自已脑海中的需求解决方案，造成产品变得越来越不接地气，线下实行起來难度系数很大。

Solution: Be sure to build a dual-advantage team in the field of Internet + traditional agriculture, and before, you must squeeze out enough time and energy to carry out in-depth market research.

3. Choose the right chips

Before starting this industry, you must carefully consider whether you really understand this industry and this field as the founder? Have you investigated the market and do you still think that there is still a problem of information asymmetry? In short, agriculture is a very, very traditional industry with backward concepts. The Internet focuses on innovation and disruption, but before you attempt to subvert agriculture, you must consider whether you have enough bargaining chips to disrupt the field.

What are the bargaining chips: sufficient funds can ensure the promotion of goods, offline services, territory expansion, etc. Solid resources , especially policy spatial support, and resources of upstream, midstream and downstream manufacturers in their industries and fields.

4. Can traditional links be used?

For agricultural supplies e-commerce, it is actually a battle process with dealer interest groups. To put it bluntly, the key to the O2O of the Internet depends on de-intermediation, reducing the commodity circulation link, and thus reducing the sales price. What we are going to is the dealer and agent link.

In the field of agricultural supplies, manufacturers have very little profits, and most of the profit points are concentrated in the intermediate commodity circulation link: dealers at each level.

Don’t forget that agents and dealers make a living by making a living in the middle links, and manufacturers also need to rely on the middle links to conduct business and services, and even financial advances and liquidation.

When some decentralization harms their existence, it will cause a series of black reactions in the future. There is no doubt that agricultural material manufacturers will have to cut off their own arms when doing e-commerce .

Therefore, no matter which e-commerce or O2O you are doing, we must consider whether we can avoid direct charges with traditional links?

5. Small and beautiful is important

Finally, agricultural + Internet products are a super pit. If you don’t have money or resources, don’t play this unless you really have this strength or have this background.

This pit is for government departments to achieve political achievements, subsidies to regions, and topics for listed companies. If you see so-called traceable advertising machines, real-time monitoring products, etc., most of them are basically concept periods, and those that cannot be popularized are basically rogues.

To put it bluntly, many agricultural innovation projects are basically done for project subsidies, and the most common situation is the beginning and the end.

The ecosystem of agriculture + Internet technology is too common, and all stages complement each other. Therefore, in the startup stage, the team should choose small and beautiful entry points as much as possible, and improve one of the stages to do a good job, and its market value will be very large.

In the 3-month market survey, this is the problem faced by the entire domestic agricultural industry:

Upstream: The scale of operations is decentralized, the technology is backward, the cost is very high, and the fortune is aroused;

Middle Tour: high transportation costs, low timeliness, too many levels in the intermediate distribution stage, and single marketing channels;

Downstream: Customer experience requirements are increasing, market supply and demand adjustments are slow, and food safety issues of agricultural products.

At this stage, the domestic agricultural Internet industry is uneven and there are no leaders (or leaders are still trying to surface). Most of them are still in the budding stage of the concept period, and a large number of entrepreneurial teams are entering from the middle and lower reaches.

Compared with advanced agricultural countries like the United States and Israel, my country can only say that it is a major agricultural country, not an agricultural power. Looking at China's agriculture today, the biggest problem at this stage is not the entry of Internet products, but the biggest faced by the multifaceted problems that are common in the upstream agricultural sector.

Therefore, we should look for opportunities to enter and improve these problems. To complete the further development of agriculture, it also requires correct guidance from the state, rural land reform, and the promotion of rural policies.

Even so, the trend of Internet technology subverting tradition has remained unchanged, but it still lacks a high-quality soil foundation for nurturing and cultivating. The current situation may be improved from two aspects: one is the cultural construction of the development of agricultural Internet by national policies, and the problems faced by rural areas and rural areas are improved from the root. Second, can the leading Internet technology transformation of the agricultural industry play a role in the correct guidance of the industry and promote Internet technology innovation in the entire agricultural field.

Finding the unique value of a product

In addition, we must also create our own unique rural product value:

Every specialty must be unique. Even if it is already a specialty product well-known by the people of the whole country, it must have unique selling points in order to have the genes to become a good brand.

Want to find the unique features of your brand? You can start from the following 5 angles:

1) Value of the place of origin

找寻属于出产地的价值，包裝你的商品之前，先包裝出产地。

例如新疆省，从古至今便是水果、红枣、葡萄的产地，出售新疆特产的卖家务必将原产地价值充分利用起來。

2) Soft culture value

为品牌讲1个感人的品牌故事，并让这个故事在社交媒体、各种各样电商平台上广泛传播，将它与你的商品关联绑定起來。

Form the unique culture of your brand, and let these cultures subtly enter customers' hearts, so that the brand is not just a cold object, but a unique product with warmth and emotion.

For example, the story of cross-bridge rice noodles, accompanied by various stores, makes cross-bridge rice noodles a well-known product, making everyone more accepting of cross-bridge rice noodles.

3) High standard value

Only high-standard specialty products can last for a long time, and you cannot greed for small profits and reduce product quality. We must strictly control product quality issues, and if conditions permit, we must make the products as standardized and processed as possible.

Of course, do high standards and don’t forget to promote them. Use social media such as Sina Weibo, mobile WeChat and even online live broadcast platforms as much as possible, so that customers can watch your product production process and strive to increase customers’ favorability.

4) Safety and health value

Nowadays, everyone basically attaches great importance to the safety and health of products, especially agricultural and special products. When specialty brands are looking for brand value, why not work hard on product efficacy, safety and health added value, and become an expert brand specializing in a certain health field in the minds of customers, and can quickly have a large number of loyal customers.

5) Unique craft value

特有的生产制造工艺也是让顾客记住的1个秘诀，无论是哪一种特色产品都需要相应工艺才可以制造出来，而对这些工艺做相应程度的包裝，就能获得品牌的又1个特有价值点。

Future development trends of rural e-commerce

Starting from the beginning of 2016, the State Council and various ministries and commissions issued intensively major documents on rural e-commerce to support the development of agricultural e-commerce. It provides many favorable guarantees for the implementation of rural e-commerce .

1. Rural e-commerce maintains a rapid development momentum: With the widespread use of innovative technologies such as "three network integration", Internet of Things, big data, and cloud computing, the scale of agricultural e-commerce will develop towards diversification, and will be connected to smart agriculture, intelligent circulation, and intelligent consumption into an organic whole, and the service environment of agricultural e-commerce is becoming increasingly improved;

2. The rural e-commerce service environment is improving: various professional service providers have begun to enter the countryside, providing a series of services such as supply of goods, warehousing, photography and video, picture processing, online store decoration and operation, planning and operation, financing and financial management, payment, brand promotion and management consulting, talent training, logistics, law and other services;

3. The rural e-commerce industry chain continues to extend: the rural area changes from retailers to distributors, from simple channel merchants to brand merchants, from raw material procurement to design, looking for manufacturers to OEM, and finally distributing goods to other small online merchants, and gradually establishing a vertical e-commerce industry chain level with brands, wholesalers, and retailers as the main body;

4. Trend of online and offline integration of rural e-commerce: The agricultural product wholesale market will give full play to the advantages of offline physical stores such as logistics, service, and experience, promote the integrated development of physical and online markets, and realize the transformation of offline physical markets.