Platform uses technology to improve farmers’ lives
Selling 2,000 metric tons of dates and receiving about 700,000 orders within just three months is not an easy task for farmers living in Lin county of Shanxi province, a poverty-stricken area some eight hours by car from Beijing.
When a good harvest came to the village at the end of 2016, Gong Wenbin, the county’s chief official, decided to seek help from e-commerce platform Pinduoduo.com.
In response, the company has adopted a customer to business model, collected a massive amount of orders and sent them to targeted sellers. In the process, Pinduoduo helped local residents set up online stores to handle booming sales that totaled more than 12 million yuan ($1.89 million).
The county is just one of the places that Pinduoduo has been supporting in recent years.
According to Pinduoduo, the company has invested 3.4 billion yuan to help farmers nationwide sell 1.83 million tons of agricultural products in 2017. Thanks to its efforts, more than 48,000 business owners in 730 national-level poverty stricken counties received more than 900 million orders and enjoyed sales growth of 310 percent in 2017.
“We are looking to integrate traditional industries and internet technology,” said Ge Shuang, vice president of Pinduoduo, “as technology can help raise pro- ductivity and business efficiency.”
“E-commerce platforms play an important role in the area of targeted poverty alleviation,” said Hong Tao, head of an economic research center at Beijing Technology and Business University. “Compared with other ways, e-commerce offered sellers more pre-sale orders and buyers much lower purchase prices.”
Pinduoduo has also offered technical support and solutions to poverty stricken farmers who are suffering from lack of product variety due to the small amount of land they cultivate.
In most impoverished areas, family plantations usually have very limited product choices, and turn to the single planting-selling business model, Ge said. Those limitations have a negative influence in forming a more sustainable and flexible mechanism.
To deal with that, Pinduoduo applied big data analysis and taught farmers about consumer behavior, particularly their purchasing patterns and preferences. Moreover, they taught farmers and business owners about alternative products to plant and offered detailed planting and selling plans.
“Technical support and data analysis help to raise plantation productivity, and bring a 3,000 yuan increase in sales per family on average last year,” said Cai Zhixiong, a business owner cooperating with Pinduoduo in its poverty-alleviation actions.
An example is Hubei-based sweet potato seller Zhou Zhenguo. Pinduoduo offered Zhou potherb mustard as an alternative to his previous sweet potato crop, and encouraged him to start chicken breeding, as well. These new practices boosted Zhou’s annual income by more than 10,000 yuan compared with the past.
“Meanwhile, we have specified staff to work with farmers to provide more scientific guidance on plantation rotation and business operations,” Shuang said.
Added Ge: “By doing that, we have established a chained business including producing, promoting, selling, benefiting and analyzing, and we will teach all of it to those business owners. It helps them in the long run compared with the past when we just donated.”
“Going forward, we will work on bettering their supply chain system and bringing in an upgrade to their current business,” Ge said.
In January, according to Pinduoduo, the company also began calling on more youngsters to found startups to sell farm products from their home village.
“More importantly, e-commerce platforms supported the local industry by starting their own business, which led to more employment and long-term development of local business,” Hong added.
E-commerce platforms play an important role in the area of targeted poverty alleviation.” Ge Shuang, vice president of Pinduoduo