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December 30, 2014

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Home » City specials » Hangzhou

Village basking in e-commerce

By Xu Wenwen | December 30, 2014, Tuesday | Print Edition

BEISHAN Village is unusual. A wall-size map along the main road into town shows the locations of the village’s main e-commerce stores, flow charts on mud walls explain how to operate an online shop and people regularly greet each other with “How’s business today?”

Hidden in Lishui City in the mountains of Zhejiang Province, Beishan has transformed itself from a “shaobing village” known for its Chinese-style pancakes to a “Taobao Village.”

There are more than 300 Taobao stores, mostly selling outdoor gear like tents and sleeping bags, and over 600 people working in the e-commerce sector in Beishan. There are also a dozen logistics agencies.

Zhao Liqin, 48, like many local women, says she used to make shaobing pancakes and sell them in other cities. For the last three years she has been working as a customer service representative for a Taobao store.

“I used to work very hard and make little money,” she says. “Now I earn over 2,000 yuan (US$322) a month and it’s pretty easy. She says she was trained to type and to communicate with customers online before taking the job.

Her “office” is actually a farmer’s house. It looks like other homes in the village with the Chinese character fu, meaning fortune, outside the door. But more than 5 million yuan in sales are generated from within its walls.

Beishan’s online stores have combined annual revenue of more than 200 million yuan.

So how did this sleepy village turn into a big force within the e-commerce sector? It has started with several enterprising individuals who have returned to their home.

Lu Hongfeng, 30, says he and his wife used to sell wholesale children’s products in Hangzhou, but decided to return home years ago to distribute BS Wolf outdoor gear, a company founded by Beishan native Lu Zhenhong.

BS Wolf’s sleeping bags outsell all competitors on Taobao, ringing up sales of more than 3 million yuan alone on November 11, also known as China’s Singles’ Day.

Lu Zhenhong says he started his Taobao business in 2006, buying sleeping bags from manufacturers and retailing them online. Little by little, he says he made some money. Eventually Lu Zhenzhong says he started designing new products and then established the BS Wolf brand.

Today there are over 50 distributors of the brand’s products in the village. Each distributor obtains the designs, photos and proposals from the company’s headquarters in Beishan. They are free to decide on their own how and what to promote.

Lu Hongfeng and his wife concentrate on tents.

The couple is the brand’s top distributor and he says one day they sold as many as 30,000 yuan worth of tents.

“We earn much more than before,” says Lu Hongfeng, adding he just spent 1.5 million yuan in cash to build a new house.

Now he’s looking at selling sweet potatoes and bamboo shoots — two specialties from Lishui.

The mountainous area has in the past made transportation difficult, but numerous fruits, nuts and vegetables grow in the area.

College graduate Lin Hai says he returned to his home in Lishui’s Qingyuan County to take care of his family’s 30-hectare orchard. They grow a special orange-pomelo hybrid, which requires red soil and does best at higher altitudes.

Lin says he opened the Taobao store Qingyuan Foodies in 2012 and sells pomelos as well as mushrooms from his hometown.

“For the past decade my mother wholesaled pomelos for like 7 yuan or 8 yuan per kilogram,” he says. “I sell them online for 20 yuan per kilo. That is the power of e-commerce and branding.”

Since starting the online store, the pomelos sell out quickly every year.

Another “legendary” Lishui product on Taobao is Ni’s Chili Paste. Dubbed the most expensive chili paste on taobao.com, it costs 48 yuan per 400g can.

The chili paste is considered legendary because within five months the online store earned one “crown” — meaning it has received 10,000 positive comments and sold over 10,000 orders.

Store owner Ni Xiangming says the secret is “to seek the ultimate.” His workers pick fresh chilies in the mountains around Lishui, dice them by hand and add ginger, garlic, sugar, oil and other spices according to customer requirements.

The key is picking the chilies in the morning when there is still dew on the plants and they have to be chopped by hand to keep the juice. Ni even includes a hand-written letter to each customer.

His chili sauce is sent to the country’s outermost regions. Ni and his colleagues have spent months ironing out the details so the chili paste (with liquid inside) can be packed with ice and transported by air to ensure freshness.

“Consumers are not stupid,” Ni says. “We sell good products and provide good service, whether it’s online or offline, we win.”

Lishui’s government has even gotten in on the act. Since 2013 the city has promoted its e-commerce industry. Last winter it launched a column named Lishui Pavilion on taobao.com. It sells local farm produce and in the first month it sold 5.5 million yuan worth of food from chicken and shaobing to bamboo shoots and mushrooms.

The city also has established an e-commerce service center to give classes and financial support to villagers so they can professionally run their e-commerce businesses.

Editor’s Note

The incredible rise of e-commerce in China has taken many by surprise. The heart of China’s e-commerce industry is centered in Zhejiang Province with Alibaba leading the way in the provincial capital Hangzhou. Today is the second in a series of our reporting about the villages that have been transformed after they embraced e-commerce.

Hangzhou


 

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