Young people engaged in e-commerce live streaming in counties and townships

In December 2022, Wang Chuanbao promoted his hometown chili in the indoor live broadcast room. Photo courtesy of interviewee

"Welcome old friends, new friends to the live broadcast room, today take you to our 650 acres of pepper planting base, learn about green pepper..." Every year in September is the pepper market period, the gratifying growth of red pepper is hidden among the dense branches and leaves, and the pepper planting base in Huilong Town, Funan County, Fuyang City, Anhui Province has a "hot" harvest scene. At this time, college students from Funan County and post-90s Wang Chuanbao shuttled through this "sea of peppers", holding up their mobile phones to shoot and display bright chili peppers while interacting with netizens in the live broadcast room. The team members are busy picking, bagging, weighing and shipping, and the fields are busy.

"Live streaming at the planting base can vividly show the freshness of peppers, which is conducive to enhancing consumer trust." Wang Chuanbao told the Zhongqing Daily reporter that chili peppers were the busiest during the listing period, with an average of more than 2,000 orders a day. In the era of "everything can be livestreamed and everyone can bring goods", Wang Chuanbao, who has been engaged in media, copywriting creative planning, catering and other work, lamented that "doing e-commerce live broadcast is not an easy task". When he first started broadcasting 4 years ago, he kept telling his ideals to the screen, and for more than two hours, there were few viewers in the live broadcast room, and finally did not sell a single order.

At present, the live broadcast industry is favored by young people. On March 29, 2023, the China Network Audiovisual Program Service Association released the "China Network Audiovisual Development Research Report (2023)", showing that the scale of online live broadcast users reached 751 million in 2022. According to a survey result of the "Survey Report on the Employment of New Youth Groups in Short Video Live Broadcast Institutions", young people aged 20 to 30 with college (higher vocational) or above education have become the core personnel composition of short video live broadcast.

Nowadays, not only in cities, but also in many counties and townships young people have also started e-commerce live broadcasts, and their survival status and persistent exploration have attracted more attention.

Explore yourself in the face of the new wind of live broadcast technology

"A good harvest but no joy." The spring planting season in 2017 coincided with the lotus root harvest. However, affected by unfavorable factors such as weather and shortage of digging lotus workers, the thousand-mu lotus root contracted by Wang Chuanbao's cousin suffered slow sales. When 27-year-old Wang Chuanbao returned to his hometown to start a business, he helped his cousin find sales channels on the Internet and call the manufacturers on the canned packaging one by one, but with little success. Later, he opened up an online sales channel on an agricultural products wholesale platform, contacted a large number of vegetable wholesalers, and the lotus root that was slow to sell that year was sold out one after another.

Wang Chuanbao realized that there were many farmers like his cousin who planted hard but worried about sales, and he had the idea of "directing" local agricultural products from the fields to the people's tables through e-commerce live broadcasts. Knowing that the Commerce Bureau of Funan County, his hometown, was launching free e-commerce training courses, Wang Chuanbao immediately signed up. Among the students in the e-commerce training class, some have rich experience in e-commerce operations, some have agricultural product planting bases, Wang Chuanbao and several students have the idea of selling agricultural goods for their hometown through e-commerce platforms, so they founded an e-commerce limited company. Huilong Town, Funan County, is known as the "hometown of chili peppers" in the country, and everyone is ready to live broadcast and promote the sale of chili peppers with thick flesh and bright color in their hometown.

Wang Chuanbao is just a microcosm of young people engaged in e-commerce live streaming in counties and townships. In recent years, rural e-commerce has developed rapidly. In order to further promote e-commerce into rural areas, in 2021, the Notice on Carrying out the Comprehensive Demonstration of E-commerce into Rural Areas in 2021 made it clear that the central finance continued to support the comprehensive demonstration of e-commerce into rural areas; In 2022, the Central Document No. 1 proposed to implement the project of "revitalizing agriculture through digital commerce", promote e-commerce into rural areas, and promote the healthy development of live streaming of agricultural and sideline products.

After 85, Lu Kai's hometown of Huanggang City, Hubei Province, is also vigorously promoting the development of e-commerce, and many places have been selected as national e-commerce into rural comprehensive demonstration counties. In 2011, due to his father's poor health, Lu Kai gave up his high-paying job and returned to his hometown for employment after 8 years of drifting north. In 2017, due to his work experience in database management and business training, he joined Hubei Nongfu E-commerce Co., Ltd. as a training instructor, training e-commerce knowledge, short video live broadcast and other course content for rural entrepreneurial youth, urban unemployed youth and other groups.

In the past six years, Lu Kai has trained more than 20,000 people, including farmers, factory employees, self-employed people, and young mothers with children at home. He hopes that through his own strength, the groups interested in e-commerce in counties and townships can "go" out through the Internet. Lu Kai found that in addition to young people who actively sign up for training, young people who already have e-commerce experience in counties and townships will also join the training team, "they not only want to learn, but also to screen talents to strengthen the team." ”

In the era of digital economy, the e-commerce industry has risen by the wind, according to Sun Ping, a young scholar at the Institute of Journalism and Communication of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, some young people who try e-commerce live streaming in counties and townships do not like the life of involution in big cities, so they return to their hometowns to try new things; Some young people return to their hometowns to start businesses due to objective restrictions such as education and experience; More young people want to take advantage of the new wind of live broadcast technology to explore themselves.

In the past three years, Sun Ping and her team have gone to Yiwu, Zhejiang, where the live training supply chain is relatively mature, and Henan Jiaozuo, a revitalization sample from poor counties to large live broadcast counties, and other places, and contacted many young people engaged in e-commerce live broadcasting, and she found that "e-commerce is a very cruel thing, not everyone can do it".

The unpredictable e-commerce environment is not a small risk

For Wang Chuanbao, e-commerce live streaming is indeed not an easy task. In the early days, when the live broadcast brought hometown peppers, it encountered trouble, peppers have high requirements for freshness, like temperature and avoid high temperature, love light and do not tolerate strong light, "peppers are very difficult to serve, need to invest a lot of energy to do a good job in the supply chain."

At first, the live broadcast sold green thread pepper, with thin skin and tender taste, attracting many customers to buy back. But what troubled Wang Chuanbao was that when many customers repurchased, the green thread pepper had reached the next stubble, the spiciness was higher than before, and it could not meet the taste of customers, and many customers reported after-sales problems. After discussion, the green pepper was removed from the shelves and replaced with wrinkled peppers with small spicy differences, and the pepper seedlings that could be grown on the balcony were put on the shelves. Wang Chuanbao realized that live streaming is also very particular, and it is necessary to constantly find the user market in order to break the dilemma of live streaming goods.

After solving the pain point of live streaming varieties, Wang Chuanbao encountered a new difficulty: he didn't know how to attract fans to do the live broadcast room. He went to major live broadcast rooms from time to time to learn live broadcast methods, and at first he felt out some doorways, and the effect was good after practice, "but the rules of the live broadcast platform are ever-changing, and it didn't take long for the doorways to be no longer applicable." In this regard, he and his team will visit some national e-commerce demonstration bases to learn from advanced experience and practices.

When Lu Kai trained the e-commerce live broadcast course, he found that many young people in counties and townships were quite interested in e-commerce live broadcasting. After the training, there are young couples after the 90s who returned to their hometown to start a business and sell pet teething sticks live, and young mothers live sell pickles and tofu milk made in their hometowns. There are also some successful cases among the trainees. Not long after the 34-year-old "egg sister" Wang Sumei started doing live broadcasting, she sold more than 4,000 eggs in a live broadcast, and now the number of live broadcast orders is growing. There are successful cases of e-commerce live broadcasting, and there are more failure cases. "Out of every two hundred people, it's good if two or three can stick to live broadcasting." Lu Kai said.

Sun Ping analyzed that many young people engaged in e-commerce live streaming in counties and townships have the spirit of bearing hardships and standing hard work, but in the face of the unpredictable e-commerce environment, the risk of entrepreneurial failure is not small, "If it cannot be done in two or three years, the sustainability of support will be greatly weakened." In Sun Ping's view, live streaming is a high-intensity, long-term labor, and the key words are "people, goods, and venues".

Sun Ping introduced that she and her team met Miss Zhang, the anchor of the video number in Huangmei County, Huanggang City, Hubei Province, who broadcast at 6:30 a.m. every day, broadcast continuously for 4 hours, and after resting for more than an hour, continued to broadcast at 12 noon, and broadcast for another 4 hours. After the broadcast, you will learn the words and routines of the popular live broadcast room of the day. Miss Zhang told Sun Ping that the anchor looks "very fragrant", but the pressure of competition is great, and it is necessary to create an atmosphere of bringing goods, with the ability to explain, affinity, adapt, and review.

The detours traveled and the pits stepped on must be regarded as nutrients

"The live broadcast is very time-consuming, and a lot of preparation has to be done before and after." Although each live broadcast can sell more than 1,000 orders for 2 to 4 hours, the unit price of chili pepper is low and the income is not high. Wang Chuanbao realized that he could not rely solely on live streaming to sell chili peppers, but also needed to open up the e-commerce market in multiple dimensions. At the same time as the live broadcast, he began to open an online store on a shopping platform, and has gained 70,000 fans so far, helping local farmers sell a variety of specialties such as Huilong pepper and Duncheng lotus root, and the store repurchase rate is also good. At the same time, Wang Chuanbao also actively explores online sales channels such as intra-city group buying and community group buying.

"After many detours and pits, we must constantly sum up lessons and constantly change our thinking according to the market." Wang Chuanbao bluntly said that relying on only a few people to promote hometown agricultural products through e-commerce live broadcasts has limited strength and poor results. Since the second half of 2022, Wang Chuanbao has begun to visit surrounding townships and help more than 200 people train e-commerce operation skills such as group buying in the same city and opening online stores for free. Every time agricultural products are concentrated on the market, the young people participating in the training will actively use live broadcasts, short videos and other methods to work together to promote agricultural products in their hometowns.

As a new farmer, Wang Chuanbao will carry out the "co-cultivation plan" with a group of college students studying agriculture to build a high-quality agricultural brand, and lead more local farmers to send the agricultural specialties they grow to all parts of the country through e-commerce platforms.

During this year's National Two Sessions, the topic of live streaming e-commerce has not decreased. Ouyang Hua, deputy to the National People's Congress and secretary of the general party branch of Baita Village, Xizhu Town, Yixing City, Jiangsu Province, suggested making good use of live streaming e-commerce to drive people to return to their hometowns for employment and entrepreneurship, actively cultivate and explore rural live broadcast leaders, and create rural live broadcast IP. Liang Qianjuan, a deputy to the National People's Congress and chairman of the Women's Federation of Shitan Village, Shuiyang Town, Huixian County, Longnan City, Gansu Province, suggested that local governments further support and encourage the professional, large-scale and industrialized development of rural e-commerce, so that high-quality products and high-quality anchors can get more traffic and support.

"E-commerce live streaming is a particularly demanding job, which requires high-intensity and long-term labor." In Sun Ping's view, if a place wants to develop e-commerce, it must connect the three aspects of live training, anchors with goods, and supply merchants. It is necessary to have a sense of business, seize the "outlet" to go upwind, and at the same time establish a very accurate customer portrait to carry out accurate sales.

Sun Ping said that there are many young people like Wang Chuanbao, they are "makers" in the context of county and township, in the development of the digital economy, with entrepreneurial spirit and self-initiative, hoping to show the willingness to resonate with the development of the times at the same frequency through continuous efforts, and the setbacks, costs, and heartache are also inevitable efforts and experiences in growth.

China Youth Daily / China Youth Net Reporter Xianlujie Han Wei Source: China Youth Daily

Source: China Youth Daily