During the recently concluded "Double 11 Shopping Spree", the total number of orders on Rural Taobao reached nearly 20 million, with transaction volume approaching 3.2 billion yuan—an 8-fold increase compared to Tmall’s Double 11 performance last year. Sales of JD.com and Suning in rural areas also saw significant year-on-year growth. Beyond these three major domestic e-commerce platforms, many others such as Pinduoduo and Lecuntao also delivered outstanding results in rural markets.
According to data analysis conducted by Yingchao Technology (Rural E-Commerce Big Data Center) commissioned by the Ministry of Commerce, rural areas achieved online retail sales of 84.608 billion yuan during the 2017 Double 11 period (November 1 to November 11). Among this, online retail sales on Double 11 Day alone reached 39.240 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 66.53%, accounting for 46.38% of the total retail sales during the entire Double 11 period.
In fact, rural e-commerce has received consistent attention since 2014. "Promoting the development of rural e-commerce" has been included in the Central No. 1 Document for four consecutive years. A series of policies have accelerated the development of rural e-commerce, and major e-commerce platforms have also entered the rural e-commerce sector one after another: Alibaba’s "Thousand Counties and Ten Thousand Villages" Plan, JD.com’s "Sparkling Across the Country" Initiative, Suning’s "Rural Easy Purchase" Program, China Post’s "Post Shopkeeper" Project, and Lenovo’s "Cloud Farm" Platform, among others.
The achievements of leading e-commerce platforms in rural markets demonstrate the effectiveness of their efforts to respond to national calls and accelerate rural layout. At the same time, we must also recognize that rural e-commerce leverages its resource advantages to drive rural industries and economic development onto a fast track, boosting rural revitalization.
The rural market now offers enormous development potential and has become a "blue ocean" contested by major e-commerce enterprises. These enterprises are also accelerating the construction of platforms and systems in rural areas, with Alibaba, JD.com, and Suning serving as typical representatives in China’s domestic e-commerce market.
In 2014, Alibaba announced the launch of its "Thousand Counties and Ten Thousand Villages" strategic plan, aiming to invest 10 billion yuan over the next 3 to 5 years to establish 1,000 county-level service centers and 100,000 village-level service stations. Up to now, Alibaba has set up over 28,000 village-level service points in nearly 500 counties. Rural Taobao has nearly 1,000 dedicated employees, 28,000 "Village Partners" (formerly known as "Village Associates"), and 50,000 staff in its service system. In July 2016, Alibaba Rural Taobao was upgraded to the "3.0 Strategy", and on October 28, "Village Associates" were officially renamed "Village Partners". The initiative aims to use a new model to extend Alibaba’s full ecological service system to rural areas, providing villagers with a variety of service products covering both production and daily life scenarios. Alibaba has identified rural strategy as one of its three core strategies, tasked with connecting the rural economy to the broader market.
In April this year, Liu Qiangdong further announced: "In the next five years, JD.com will open more than 1 million JD convenience stores nationwide, with half of them in rural areas—one in every village. This is JD.com’s third offline cooperation project following the plan to open 10,000 JD home appliance stores." Industry insiders analyze that, from the perspective of overall layout, this represents a shift in JD.com’s expansion strategy for rural markets, using physical stores to "penetrate" rural areas. Meanwhile, these cooperative offline stores are innovative complexes integrating online and offline models, serving as JD.com’s distribution channels.
Suning has also continued to increase its investment in rural markets. In 2016, Suning.com invested 5 billion yuan to build nearly 2,000 Suning.com Direct Stores, over 1,900 authorized Suning.com service outlets, and 200 online local characteristic pavilions. It also created 20 "Most Beautiful Village" models, raising Suning’s logistics coverage rate in third- and fourth-tier markets to 87%. This year, in response to national calls, Suning.com plans to open another 1,000 Suning.com Direct Stores in rural areas, further strengthening its rural e-commerce strategy.
Additionally, data from the Ministry of Commerce shows that Alibaba’s "Thousand Counties and Ten Thousand Villages" Plan has covered approximately 700 counties and 30,000 villages, with over 30,000 partners. JD.com has recruited 300,000 rural promoters, and Suning has accelerated its localization process, establishing over 10,000 service points.
"Against the backdrop of major changes in the Internet industry, urban e-commerce markets have become saturated. Major e-commerce platforms have begun to compete for rural markets, and rural e-commerce—once developing slowly—has now gained attention," Cao Lei, Director of the China E-Commerce Research Center, told a reporter from China Industrial and Economic News. He noted that while the commercial ecosystem in rural areas has its complexities, its considerable development potential is even more striking.
Hong Tao, Professor at the School of Economics of Beijing Technology and Business University and Dean of the China Food (Agricultural Products) Safety E-Commerce Institute, stated in an interview with China Industrial and Economic News that rural e-commerce has developed rapidly since 2014, driven by improved infrastructure, upgraded online and offline platforms, advancing technologies, increased focus on exploring ecological products, and strong support from national policies—all of which are key factors behind the remarkable achievements of e-commerce in rural areas.
Notably, Hong Tao believes that the development of rural e-commerce in recent years has not only formed a "new retail" trend where high-quality products are made available in rural areas but also continuously opened up new "direct supply and direct sales" channels for rural products to enter cities. At the same time, e-commerce platforms have begun to focus on building interaction between online and offline platforms, emphasizing the exploration of ecological products and tourism resources, and investing in improving the quality and building brands of new agricultural products to drive industrial poverty alleviation in the regions where these products originate. For example, officials from the Ministry of Agriculture recently publicly praised the "Luochuan Apple" industrial poverty alleviation model driven by rural e-commerce and promoted it as a model nationwide.
In fact, e-commerce has long been playing a role in boosting rural economic development. Pinduoduo, a social e-commerce platform, helped Miaojia Village in Huayin City, Shaanxi Province, sell 15,000 catties of Shaanxi walnuts this year; it sold 1 million catties of Zhongmou garlic in five days; and it assisted poverty-stricken villages in Shaanxi in opening online stores to sell 700,000 packs of red dates, solving the problem of difficult and poor sales for people in poverty-stricken areas.
As a targeted poverty alleviation project of Rural Taobao, 1.7 million catties of Aksu apples (produced in Xinjiang) were sold on Tmall in just 12 hours. In addition, 20 types of agricultural products sold jointly by Rural Taobao and Tmall achieved a transaction volume of 450 million yuan on Double 11 Day.
Within 10 hours of this year’s Double 11, villagers in Wanqianji Village, Heze City, Shandong Province, sold over 4,000 orders of four-piece bedding sets, worth approximately 5 million yuan. Heze is an underdeveloped city in Shandong, with relatively backward rural areas, and rural e-commerce has directly driven the development of poverty-stricken regions here.
Lecuntao also made active efforts in rural markets during Double 11, adopting an online-offline integrated model to sell agricultural and specialty products such as Gaoling Town black rice, Longwan Township passion fruit, original species of beans from various towns, and woven straw hats from Disu Town. From November 11 to 12 this year, Lecuntao achieved online and offline sales of over 80,000 yuan for agricultural products and handicrafts in Du’an, Guangxi.
Indeed, e-commerce has made significant achievements in promoting industrial poverty alleviation and poverty reduction in rural areas. Data shows that online retail sales in national demonstration counties for e-commerce in rural areas maintained a sound growth momentum. A total of 756 such demonstration counties achieved online retail sales of 25.960 billion yuan, accounting for 30.68% of total rural online retail sales. Among this, online retail sales on Double 11 Day reached 11.872 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 88.21%.
At the same time, national-level poverty-stricken counties also delivered strong performance. A total of 832 national-level poverty-stricken counties achieved online retail sales of 8.526 billion yuan during the Double 11 period, accounting for 10.08% of total rural online retail sales. Among this, online retail sales on Double 11 Day reached 4.263 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 102.48%.
The development of rural e-commerce has created a new industrial chain in rural areas, covering links such as product production, processing, warehousing, inspection, packaging, distribution, and logistics. This complete industrial chain has provided greater support for boosting employment.
"At present, the issues of agricultural products being sold to cities and industrial products being sold to rural areas remain unsolved. Farmers have a low level of digital literacy and limited purchasing power. From a national perspective, a truly successful model for rural e-commerce has not yet emerged."
Major e-commerce enterprises are accelerating their layout in counties and towns, bringing favorable development opportunities for China’s rural e-commerce: policy support has been unprecedentedly strengthened, rural Internet penetration rate has increased year by year, rural residents’ consumption capacity has gradually improved, and employment in rural e-commerce has become increasingly localized. Rural e-commerce has become an emerging force that cannot be ignored in influencing China’s rural economic development and boosting rural revitalization, indicating broad prospects for its future development.
