(1) development of fresh E-commerce
1.1 development status of fresh E-commerce
In recent years, due to the huge consumption base of online shopping, the increasing living standards of people, the help of national policies and regulations, the abundant supply of fresh products and other favorable conditions, and the development and transformation of the fresh e-commerce industry for more than 10 years, the fresh e-commerce has entered a relatively high-speed development stage. According to the data in the "China's fresh e-commerce industry solutions and investment strategy planning report" released by the forward looking Industry Research Institute, the market transaction scale of China's fresh e-commerce industry has reached 13 billion yuan since 2013, and then it has shown a rapid growth trend year by year, with an average annual growth rate of more than 40%. In 2019, the transaction scale reached 288.8 billion yuan, which is a worthy potential stock in new retail. Due to its special industrial structure, the fresh e-commerce industry has not yet formed a monopoly situation and has great market development space. In addition, the fresh e-commerce is a blue ocean that still needs to be developed due to the reshuffle of fresh online shopping in 2019. At the same time, the fresh e-commerce industry also has its inherent problems, such as low market penetration and imperfect cold chain logistics system. During the epidemic period, because "contactless delivery" is helpful to epidemic prevention, door-to-door delivery and other services meet the needs of consumers, the order volume of fresh e-commerce surged.
1.2 fresh e-commerce development opportunities
In order to effectively control the spread of novel coronavirus pneumonia, China quickly launched the first-level response policy to public health emergencies, which reduced the flow of personnel to the greatest extent and prevented the spread and spread of the epidemic. "Staying at home" has become the best way for people to protect themselves. In addition, tourism, catering and other service industries during the Spring Festival were greatly affected by the epidemic. However, in this case, online shopping is more popular than before. Compared with traditional industries, e-commerce industry has ushered in new development opportunities in the crisis.
(1) The basic conditions have been met
China's e-commerce has a large user base and a high e-commerce penetration rate, which provides good conditions for promoting the development of emerging e-commerce. In recent years, from the perspective of consumers' preferences, the products purchased by consumers from e-commerce channels have also begun to change from standardized products such as shoes, hats and clothing to daily necessities such as food. At present, among all the commodities sold through e-commerce in China, the growth rate of food category is the highest. Food will become the new direction of China's e-commerce development in the future.
(2) Opportunities provided by the epidemic
The unique advantage of fresh e-commerce is high stickiness. Fresh products belong to high-frequency consumption. Therefore, as long as the habit is formed, users will become dependent and it is difficult to leave. Under the influence of the epidemic, fresh e-commerce has introduced a large number of users. In addition, the epidemic lasts for a long time, which is enough to enable users to develop consumption habits. On the one hand, users can place orders in spare time, and on the other hand, the platform selects the best route to implement door-to-door service, which greatly saves the time cost of consumers and meets the shopping needs of fast-paced life and low time cost in modern society. Affected by the epidemic, consumers will try to avoid close contact with others. Fresh e-commerce can realize contactless distribution, which helps to improve the efficiency of epidemic prevention. Therefore, the development of fresh e-commerce will be the general trend.
(2) challenges faced by fresh e-commerce under the background of COVID-19
2.1 order surge and insufficient supply
During the outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia in 2020, the whole country made all-out efforts to fight against it. All temple fairs in Beijing were cancelled, all new year movies were removed from the shelves, and the people's "cloud new year" and other "contactless" activities were implemented. This kind of "closed door" lifestyle of the whole people will naturally trigger physiological and psychological needs in the long-term self closed environment. Due to the demand of various places for epidemic prevention and the arrival of the Spring Festival holiday, some catering industries and large shopping malls will be closed, while the long-distance logistics relied on by traditional e-commerce will almost stop under the dual influence of the Spring Festival period and the epidemic prevention and control. Under this background, online fresh e-commerce has witnessed explosive growth. Orders for fresh e-commerce platforms such as HEMA fresh, dingdong buy vegetables, Suning vegetable market and daily excellent fresh have surged, The phenomenon of insufficient supply.
2.2 insufficient storage capacity and imperfect supply chain
In terms of storage, on the one hand, fresh products have short preservation period, easy deterioration, large consumption and a variety of categories. For the physical properties of fresh products, if no corresponding warehouse storage system is established, storage is a major problem for fresh products. In addition, due to the "house economy" created by the epidemic, the proportion of people buying fresh food online has increased significantly, and the orders of major platforms have surged, resulting in out of sales of orders and short sales of products. Therefore, systematization and digitization of fresh food products are urgent issues to be solved. On the other hand, due to the impact of the epidemic, and the long distance between the production place and the sales place, the transportation is limited, and the logistics cannot be transported in time. The agricultural products in some agricultural products production places are piled up in large quantities and cannot be transported to all parts of the country. In general, farmers do not have corresponding warehouses for storing fresh products, so the agricultural products cannot be realized. The economic life of small farmers is under great pressure, the supply and demand of fresh products are unbalanced in different regions, and the market price gap is large. On the issue of supply chain, the picking and harvesting time of fresh products are not timely and cannot be tracked in time. Due to the impact of the epidemic, the logistics chain of fresh e-commerce is too long, and the physical links from procurement to general warehouse, front warehouse to distribution and after-sales will cause a lot of losses. It often occurs that the delivery is not timely, the goods are not delivered for a long time, the order is easy to be cancelled after the order is placed, or the order cannot be cancelled, the refund is difficult and the money is not returned in time, and the after-sales service user experience is poor.
2.3 high labor cost and no standardization of quality control
On the issue of cost, according to statistics, the loss rate of fruits and vegetables in China is about 25% - 30%, which is much higher than the 1.7% - 5.0% in the United States. This problem has greatly increased the sales cost of fresh agricultural products, resulting in further compression of its profit space. Due to information asymmetry in the north and South markets, in addition, online fresh products also face a problem of low customer unit price. In addition, during the epidemic period, the human resources decreased and the demand increased. The distribution cost of fresh products is also higher. On the issue of quality control, the vendors are full of them. The fresh products are not standardized, the SKU is out of control, the product packaging is not environmentally friendly, the fresh value of the goods cannot be guaranteed, the weight of the goods is missing and the transaction weight is not consistent, the quality of the goods is not guaranteed, the commodity price is not regulated by the market, the seller changes randomly according to the supply and demand of the goods, and the pesticide residue exceeds the standard. The freshness of some fresh and perishable products cannot be guaranteed.
(3) Countermeasures of fresh e-commerce under the background of COVID-19
3.1 coordinate transportation capacity and improve supply
The order volume of fresh e-commerce platform has increased rapidly, and it has become the backbone force to fight the epidemic, and has also brought great pressure to large enterprises. Platforms such as HEMA Xiansheng and dingdong shopping for vegetables said that they were actively coordinating to increase the transportation capacity and gradually ease the tension. HEMA fresh food company implements the service policy of "no closure, no price increase" to ensure the continuous supply of vegetables and other livelihood goods. Dingdong has set up three groups to ensure safety, quality and distribution. More than 100 purchasing personnel have been sent to various production areas to purchase fresh ingredients and adjust the dish matching strategy to more effectively improve efficiency.
3.2 improve warehousing management mode and improve supply chain efficiency
If we start from the storage problem, we should reduce the accumulation of fresh products in the hands of farmers, and sell them now to ensure freshness. For the storage, we can measure according to the product demand. Generally, we do not need to adopt the one-stop transportation mode of directly picking and packing. For the problems of short temporary preservation period, various types and high loss rate of fresh products. Warehouse management is the key to improve the loss problem. Through the systematization and digitization of warehouse management and the innovation of warehouse mode, the loss can be controlled within a reasonable range, so as to obtain profits. According to the trend analysis of the fresh e-commerce industry, there are some innovative storage modes in the industry, such as front-end warehouse, offline store and super Union. In the future, with the further expansion of market scale and the increase of commodity types and quantities, the warehousing management mode also needs to be improved.
As for the supply chain problem, due to the mismatch of market information, consumers of agricultural products, fruits and vegetables, especially aquatic and seafood products, can not understand and control the product information in real time. If the supply chain is enabled by big data and blockchain, this problem can be solved. Big data collates customer data, summarizes user needs from the source, predicts and updates in real time according to user's purchase preferences, builds a digital industrial chain, improves the integrated operation efficiency of the industrial chain, and provides integrated services for pre-sales, in-sales and after-sales; Using the blockchain to record and update data in real time, the real-time monitoring from the output of products to the delivery to customers provides convenience for the tracking of each order and the traceability of products. For example, when the Yangcheng Lake hairy crab was salvaged and landed, when it was packed and transported, the length of the transportation time, the place it passed through and the destination are clear at a glance. For fruit and vegetable agricultural products, real-time monitoring can be carried out from the process of harvesting, field arrangement, channel sorting, transportation and so on.
3.3 reasonably control cost and improve quality control
In terms of cost, logistics can learn from Alibaba's rookie alliance strategy, allocate logistics facilities, and perform their respective duties to reduce logistics costs. In terms of product consumption, different packaging methods can be adopted for different physical properties of products. For some perishable products, cold chain transportation should be used, and a complete cold chain logistics system should be built. Carry out the contract system with the contracted logistics company, carry out reasonable risk assessment and management for the consumption of fresh products during transportation, and require the logistics company to settle the claim according to the contract according to the value exceeding the estimated value. Based on the assumption of rational people, the logistics company must be more careful in the transportation of fresh products than before, and reduce the consumption rate of products. For the merchants selling fresh products, they can set the conditions of package mail or full discount, increase the unit price of a single customer, and reduce the waste of logistics resources and the increase of costs. In terms of consumers, we should learn from the experience of the epidemic - adopt "contactless" distribution. Staff or robots will put the goods ordered by consumers into the offline service points for free, and encourage consumers to pick them up. If they need to deliver them to the door, they need to pay the corresponding distribution fees.
In terms of quality control, first of all, the government should thoroughly implement the laws and regulations on e-commerce of fresh products, standardize the online shopping market, and purify the online business environment. Secondly, the product specifications of fresh products are strictly controlled through the blockchain, and the freshness of products is updated in real time. The blockchain is used to prevent and inspect fake and shoddy fresh products and ensure the product quality. For the packaging of products, first, different packaging should be adopted according to the physical properties of different products; second, environmental friendly and degradable packaging materials should be used to ensure non-toxic, pollution-free, green and healthy.
(4) summary
On the whole, under the epidemic, fresh e-commerce has indeed ushered in unprecedented development opportunities and demographic dividends. However, we should also see that it is facing great difficulties in supply chain, cost and quality control. In addition, the development of fresh e-commerce is also being restricted by human capital, the transformation of users' online purchasing methods and storage problems. It is not clear whether the fresh e-commerce can usher in a new spring after the outbreak of the epidemic, but it is certain that the epidemic not only makes the fresh e-commerce more active, but also makes the short board of its supply chain more prominent in the ordering process, and the transaction volume and transaction volume rise briefly. When the epidemic subsides, consumers' consumption activities will eventually return to the right track. The final competition of fresh e-commerce lies in the fine operation ability of each company and the overall layout of the supply chain, storage, physical goods, time distribution and flow.