E-commerce

Liang Qianjuan, a farmer from Longnan, Gansu province, spent more than a decade in Guangdong province to earn a living after dropping out of middle school. She moved up from being a migrant worker on an assembly line to a secretary in an office.

In 2013, encouraged by the local government's policies supporting e-commerce development, she made a decision that changed not only her own fortunes, but those of others in her home village.

She opened an online store selling farm produce.

"Online sales and livestreaming are the current trend. Compared with simply selling products through online shops, livestreaming allows better communication with customers and boosts sales as they can see the products in a more vivid way," she said.

"In the beginning, fellow villagers all thought e-commerce was nothing but a fraud, and they still sold to middlemen when I offered a higher price," she said. "My store, as a result, only had one product on sale－my family's homegrown walnuts."

But her store proved so popular that in just over a year she gained quite a few regular customers and started selling more local agricultural products online. Many local farmers began enlisting her help to sell their produce in return for a cut of the sales.

In 2019, Liang sold more than 50 metric tons of agricultural products through online orders. Due to the expansion of her online sales, she now has 400 local farmers supplying products to her－a quarter of whom used to live below the poverty line.

Cellphones have been considered as a new kind of farm implement. In 2020, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs launched a weeklong campaign to teach farmers how to use mobile phone applications. Farmers were trained in livestreaming via mobile phones and short-video marketing. Local authorities followed suit. Many farmers began earning more with the help of e-commerce.