Rural live e-commerce has brought direct benefits to farmers, so that agricultural products can face consumers face to face through the screen, so that high-quality agricultural products that are "raised in the mountains are unknown" have entered the big market, and the rise of live e-commerce has led to the tide of farmers returning to their hometowns, and the countryside is no longer only a place for the elderly and children left behind. With the development of the network and the improvement of live broadcast technology, the countryside has also become a major choice for new farmers to start a business, including college graduates, veterans, agricultural science workers, urban people who love rural life, etc. People's participation has revitalized the traditional and slightly declining rural areas, and rural live e-commerce has more development possibilities.
Although the favorable policies, the support of media platforms, and the coordination of public welfare organizations have jointly opened a new development voyage of rural live e-commerce, there are still some difficulties in development due to the historical reasons of rural development and the imperfection of basic equipment. For example, some rural areas are remote, there is a network, logistics "last kilometer" problem, some agricultural products production lack of planning, low quality, serious homogenization, difficult to integrate into the e-commerce chain. The specific difficult challenges are as follows:
Product supply chains face challenges. From the perspective of the upward trend of rural live e-commerce, in the early stage of development, the main challenges come from policies and infrastructure, the main challenges faced in the middle of development are reflected in both operation and talent, and the focus of competition in the mature stage is the supply chain. The requirements of e-commerce platforms in terms of delivery speed and packaging quality have risen with consumer demand, and supply chain management has become a key factor in the core competitiveness of each platform. The demand for supply chain, the first is quality. Quality involves three levels, namely the quality control of the source of specialty procurement, the production quality inspection of processing manufacturers and the quality of all consumer contact points in the final warehousing and delivery process. The second is agility. The greater the agility, the stronger the effect of coordinating the contradiction between the change in e-commerce sales and the redundancy of production capacity. At present, the rural areas that can ensure the product supply chain are still very few, and how to ensure the stability, safety and convenience of the supply chain completely needs to be solved urgently.
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There is a problem with the three-stage logistics. Rural e-commerce has certain particularities, mainly reflected in logistics. How to solve the three stages (the first is inter-provincial and inter-city trunk logistics; the second paragraph is from the city to the county or village; the third stage is from the village to the end of the consumer's hands) logistics has become a problem that rural live e-commerce must face. The most difficult of the three-stage logistics is the first and last stages. Due to the scattered characteristics of rural residents, the cost of logistics pickup and delivery is very high, which means that rural residents cannot enjoy the convenient services of e-commerce delivery like urban residents. In terms of end-of-line distribution, there are also inevitable storage problems and packaging problems for fresh agricultural products. Different fresh agricultural products have different requirements for storage and transportation conditions, and there are various restrictions that need to be frozen, refrigerated, anti-squeeze, ventilation, etc., resulting in high costs of fresh logistics and difficult to distribute. For example, strawberries belong to fresh food, because of the particularity of its fruit structure, to do the express delivery process can not be squeezed, so a fruit a package, layers of protection can not be squeezed, so that the original cost of strawberries is not high, plus packaging fees, insurance fees and courier fees appear high prices. This is "not worth it" for consumers, and it is also a great test for fruit growers, on the one hand, the packaging is too laborious, on the other hand, it also has to bear the risk of compensation for bad fruits. Therefore, rural logistics problems, especially logistics in remote mountainous areas, packaging and logistics of fresh products, are the problems that need to be solved by rural live e-commerce at present, and they are also a big test for the orderly advancement of village broadcasting projects.
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There is a shortage of e-commerce talents in rural areas. The "2020 China Rural E-commerce Talent Status and Development Report" shows that "the gap in 2025 is 3.5 million people". At present, the general cultural level of rural anchors with goods is low, of which the primary school cultural population accounts for 1%, the initial Chinese population accounts for 50%, and only 16.5% has the university or college education level. Rural areas are fertile soil for the development of live e-commerce, but due to the imperfect industrial environment, insufficient public space in rural areas, rural young and middle-aged people going out to work, tribal distribution of residence, industrialization has not yet formed, it is not easy to gather professional talents who understand media applications and live e-commerce operation and management. Any development of human society is inseparable from people as the core, the current rural live e-commerce is in its infancy, and the facilities of all parties are still relatively weak, so attracting live e-commerce talents and staying in rural development is a problem that needs to be overcome.
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To this end, the village broadcast project designed and launched the Kuaishou live broadcast questionnaire, randomly selected the delivery sample, and analyzed the attitude and cognition of Kuaishou users on the rural e-commerce live broadcast. Among them, the questionnaire was released online, and a total of 165 valid questionnaires were obtained, and the proportion of men and women in the sample was basically balanced, and the proportion of women was slightly higher. The education level of the respondents who filled out the questionnaire was mainly based on universities (colleges), accounting for more than 65.2%, and the Kuaishou platform had a large number of markets and loyal users in the countryside, so the mass base was very high but the cultural level was low.
Figure 4.1 Survey of the distribution of platforms for users to purchase agricultural products
36% of the respondents (Figure 4.1) said that the purchase of agricultural products is through the live e-commerce platform, because the rural live broadcast makes people more scene substitution and intimacy, and feels that the products are safer and fresher; nearly 28% of the respondents said that they buy agricultural products through community e-commerce; 15% of the respondents buy agricultural products through traditional e-commerce; the number of people who buy agricultural products in offline supermarkets and offline agricultural products wholesale markets is relatively low, which shows that e-commerce shopping has become a mainstream consumption trend. Overall, the respondents' focus on rural e-commerce live broadcasting is relatively high, which has a certain relationship with the respondents' education level, age distribution, and loyalty to using the Kuaishou platform. It is not difficult to see from the above figure that the live e-commerce of agricultural products has surpassed traditional e-commerce and offline stores and has become the first choice for young people to shop, with a lot of room for development.
Figure 4.2 Distribution of the number of people watching rural live broadcasts
In the statistics on the number of people who watch rural live broadcasts or short videos (Figure 4.2), nearly 47% of respondents said that they often watch rural live broadcasts or short videos; nearly 40% of respondents said they watched occasionally; and the proportion of respondents who rarely watched or did not watch at all was relatively low. Most of the respondents said that watching rural live broadcasts or short videos is a new way of entertainment, in the era of pan-entertainment of the media, feel the idyllic scenery and the simple life atmosphere of the villagers through the lens, look at the countryside from a new perspective, know the farmers, is a good way to decompress, and you can buy products during the viewing process, which will bring pleasure to the body and mind.
Figure 4.3 Recognition of the utility of live e-commerce platforms to help farmers
In the survey statistics on the effectiveness of e-commerce live broadcasting platforms to help farmers (Figure 4.3), nearly 55.3% of respondents said that rural live e-commerce can effectively alleviate the problem of unsalable agricultural products; 46.9% of respondents said that rural live e-commerce can help farmers reduce economic losses; 37.2% of respondents said that they can effectively and stably understand the market price of agricultural products; 37.0% of respondents said that rural e-commerce live broadcasting can help farmers expand sales channels and increase economic income.
Figure 4.4 Proportion of rural live broadcast users on short video platforms
According to the Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet Network, as of December 2020, the number of live webcast users in the mainland reached 617 million, an increase of 57.03 million over March 2020, accounting for 62.4% of the total Internet users. Among them, the scale of e-commerce live broadcast users was 388 million, an increase of 123 million over March 2020, accounting for 39.2% of the total netizens.
According to the results of questionnaire (2) on 100 rural anchors (Figure 4.4), 49% of rural e-commerce live broadcast users chose to live on the Kuaishou platform; 28% chose Douyin live broadcasting; 12% would do live broadcasting on the Taobao platform; and the remaining 11% of live broadcast users chose Pinduoduo or other e-commerce platforms. According to the results of this questionnaire, most farmer anchors are accustomed to live broadcasting through live broadcasting and short video media, and the vast majority of respondents believe that live broadcasting through live broadcast platforms can interact with viewers to express their ideas on the one hand, and sell products in a communicative way is easier than traditional e-commerce platforms with strong purpose, on the other hand, because the live broadcast platform is not only live broadcasting, but also can learn knowledge and solve problems on the platform, and the perfect combination of learning and sales is greater than other e-commerce platforms.
Through the above survey results, it can be seen that the rural live e-commerce industry has a huge space, and a blue ocean market with 900 million farmers needs to be tapped urgently. In this new era of media for everyone, every farmer can become an anchor, can endorse and bring goods for his hometown, and show his style and hometown appearance in live video broadcasts. Everyone can broadcast live, and the era of rural live broadcasting in villages and villages with anchors has officially begun, and attracts more and more people's attention with its unique advantages.