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E-commerce: Changing the landscape of rural poverty

GPIG by Zhang Ling, November 2, 2016 Adjust font size:

Villager from Cheng County smiles. [GPIG/Photo by Jiao Meng]

Digitizing Traditional Enterprises

"In an effort to respond to the needs of online shoppers, we created an online retail store that makes all our new products exclusively available online. It makes our business more profitable as revenue grows quicker," spoke Chen Yanjun, who used to be a storeowner in Cheng County.

E-commerce brings new market opportunities across China for enterprises, while pushing traditional retailers to reinvent and upgrade by embracing "O2O". All information about a product or service is available just one click away.

A company from Cheng County specializing in honeysuckle began to integrate its online and offline retailing in 2014 with the help of the local government. In the past, it only sold honeysuckle vines to other factories for further processing, which could then be used in herbal medicine, but the profit margin wasn’t that big.

Now, it has digitized its retail services and opened up its official Taobao online store. Furthermore, a new honeysuckle tea factory was also set up after integrating natural resources into the digitization of sales and management. With an enlarged customer base and market, its online income reached 1 million yuan (U.S. $148,000), accounting for 33 percent of its sales revenue.

Going digital has been a trend and can be observed across many industries in Cheng County today. For instance, hotel and retail businesses have taken a digital initiative to go online via e-commerce, thus reaching a larger customer base and improving business visibility as well as profitability.

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