It is not easy for e-commerce to enter rural areas. Three major obstacles need to be addressed.

Almost all e-commerce companies are considering or even implementing e-commerce in villages recently. When I went home for the National Day holiday, I saw a lot of e-commerce ads on the walls. There are JD.com and Alibaba. Alibaba invited some county governors from all over the country to Hangzhou for a meeting a few months ago, and held a Zhejiang county governors meeting a few days ago. It seems that no one else can do it. But is it really that easy to implement e-commerce in rural areas?

The essence of e-commerce enterprises entering rural areas is that the bottleneck of urban e-commerce user growth has appeared, and the growth of new users on major platforms has stagnated. Therefore, we can see that almost all platforms are doing a lot of work in digging deep into users this year, especially JD.com and Alibaba’s multiple initiatives in big data, which have transformed from customer demand-based e-commerce to actively push customer demand e-commerce. However, due to the limitations of big data platforms in data docking and integration, data model establishment, etc., the real contribution of big data to e-commerce has not yet begun, so everyone has set their sights on the vast rural market. But Tie Ge believes that it is not as easy as just saying it, and e-commerce companies entering rural areas must overcome the following barriers to success:

1. User

Although the rural population is large, a large part of the population has not yet been activated by e-commerce users, or even has not yet touched the Internet. At present, most young people in rural areas go to school and work in other places, and the strong and healthy laborers go to work in other places, leaving only the elderly, women and children behind. The number of these users who can actually be converted into e-commerce users is very small.

Although many e-commerce companies believe that migrant workers returning to rural areas will bring e-commerce concepts back home and take root, and have cited a large number of good rural e-commerce cases, we must not treat individual cases as trends. At present, the attractiveness of rural areas to young people is constantly decreasing. Although some have returned, most still choose to work in counties and cities closer to their hometowns. Tie Ge returned to his hometown on November 11, and 70% of his elementary school playmates were not there. Some of them bought houses and settled down in the county town and surrounding cities.

But we don’t have to be too pessimistic. Rural users’ sensitivity to prices is a favorable condition for their e-commerce activation. When Tiege returned to his hometown, he found a special e-commerce purchasing store in the town. The boss carefully selected high-quality and low-priced e-commerce products for customers to choose from, and then the boss would buy various products for them, charging only two or three yuan for the purchase fee. The low-price strategy of Chinese e-commerce has a lot of appeal to rural users. Tiege chatted with the boss and learned that many housewives are accustomed to going to large supermarkets to choose goods, and then write down the product names and choose to buy them online.

But after all, this is done by the people themselves, and its efficiency and quality are much worse. It is particularly important for e-commerce companies to enter rural areas and educate and activate users in a fast and good way.

2. Logistics

Although rural areas have a large population, the dispersed population poses a great challenge to logistics. In addition to convenient urban transportation, the biggest advantage of urban logistics is that the urban structure determines that the number of online shoppers is relatively concentrated, and logistics companies are suitable to use operations research methods to plan reasonable routes and minimize logistics costs.

The rural market is completely different. If a courier wants to deliver goods to a village with a population of more than 1,000, it may take more than ten miles, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Even so, in the past, if many people shop online, it was considered good if they could get 1-5% of the goods every day, but this was a small amount of freight. If several villages were to deliver goods together, the labor and various logistics expenses would be very high. The high logistics costs have also led to the fact that major logistics companies have not yet implemented door-to-door delivery services in rural areas. Most of them choose to deliver to the courier points in the town and let users pick up the goods themselves.

But the problem arises again. The time of the current rural population is also extremely precious. With the development of urban and rural enterprises and agricultural industrialization, many idle rural laborers have been transformed into rural industrial workers, transferring their land to agricultural enterprises and working for them, earning about fifty yuan a day. If you want to go to the town to pick up the goods, you must take a leave, so the loss may not be less than the discount at the time of purchase. Therefore, many rural people choose to pick up the goods in the town during rainy days when they cannot go to work. In this way, the attractiveness of e-commerce products to users in terms of timeliness is greatly reduced.

If e-commerce companies want to compete in the rural market, logistics is a good entry point, but the investment is imaginable. Maybe Alibaba's negotiations with county governors will include this part.

3. Mobile shutdown

Due to the complexity of traditional PC operation, the middle-aged and older people with real purchasing power in rural areas are almost non-Internet users, but due to the convenience of mobile Internet, almost every middle-aged person has a smartphone. The booming development of smartphones has indeed provided the prerequisite for e-commerce companies to enter the rural areas.

However, rural middle-aged people with purchasing power are often not deep users of mobile Internet. In rural areas, you can hardly see people holding their mobile phones to check WeChat and Weibo. The community relationship in traditional villages makes people pay more attention to face-to-face communication. Because of this, it is difficult for e-commerce companies in rural areas to get users to check information whenever they want. Mobile e-commerce cannot simply copy the past PC e-commerce model and replicate it in rural areas.

Therefore, e-commerce platforms need to analyze user behavior based on big data platforms, predict user purchasing needs, and push the products that users need most to customers. Only through active push can users pay enough attention to form purchasing power.

Therefore, this requires e-commerce companies to accelerate the layout of big data and speed up the process of mobile e-commerce in rural areas in terms of data collection points, data models, and the layout of targeted products.

E-commerce enterprises should not just stay in painting walls and slogans when entering rural areas. If they cannot overcome the above three barriers, it will be difficult for e-commerce enterprises to truly develop in the rural market. Here, Tie Ge also advises e-commerce enterprises not to be anxious and to do a good job in basic skills.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.