Need a new direction for agricultural products on e-commerce platforms

Agricultural products have difficulty reaching consumers on e-commerce platforms

On the afternoon of March 25, representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Ministry of Information and Communications met to discuss the Plan to support bringing agricultural production to the e-commerce platform, promoting the development of the agricultural digital economy. industrial, rural. Mr. Nguyen Quoc Toan, Director of the Center for Digital Transformation and Agricultural Statistics, emphasized that since the pandemic, transaction methods on e-commerce floors have become increasingly superior with the initiative of subjects including farmers, Trade floors, cooperatives,... and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development are the agencies promoting these activities.

However, bringing agricultural products to the market faces many difficulties such as farmers needing to be "professionalized" from business registration, production, trade, production linkage, product training and operating on the e-commerce platform. Mr. Toan believes that the difficulty lies in the fact that the connection between farmers and e-commerce platforms is not really strong compared to when farmers through cooperatives bring agricultural products into retail chains due to the dependence on storage and discounts. reasonable for consumers.

The Postmart e-commerce platform was born in 2019 with the mission of connecting consumers to consume agricultural products, while sponsoring farmers, business households and businesses. Postmart is an e-commerce platform specializing in providing high quality agricultural products, meeting OCOP, VietGAP standards and specialties from regions in Vietnam.

However, according to Mr. Tran Minh Tuan, Director of the Department of Digital Economy and Digital Society (Ministry of Information and Communications), despite efforts, Postmart floor has not achieved the expected results after more than 2 years of operation. dynamic. Mr. Tuan analyzed that one of the main reasons is that farmers still do not have the habit of participating in e-commerce platforms and only trade with traders.

In that context, Mr. Tuan proposed that the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development need to have a specific strategy to bring fresh agricultural products to the e-commerce platform, encourage farmers and traders to participate in the value chain, giving an example of instead of taking advantage of B2B channel (Business to Business - business form between businesses), can be deployed under B2B2C channel (Business To Business To Customer - business model with cooperation between 2 B2B businesses to sell products , the service reaches the final consumer).

He affirmed: "The support from agricultural extension programs and initiatives spread by the Department of Quality, Processing and Market Development (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development) will help us promote the development of the electronic market. . The two sides need to communicate regularly and send quarterly reports to the National Committee on digital transformation, thereby helping to increase attention and support from relevant ministries and branches."

Decision No. 924/QD-TTg, dated August 02, 8 of the Prime Minister approving the digital transformation program in building new rural areas, towards smart new rural areas in the period 2022 - 2021 has opened up a new direction. An important step is to define smart rural areas as areas that have electronic connections with consumers.

However, the implementation of electronic agricultural trade still faces many difficulties, with overlapping and intertwining responsibilities of ministries and branches. Because e-commerce platforms require strict processes and complex legal procedures, farmers and traders have difficulty accessing them. To solve this problem, it is necessary to create conditions for farmers to become e-commerce platform operators.

Get rid of the traditional approach of e-commerce

One of the potential solutions is to leverage the power of social networks like TikTok. Trading on TikTok has the advantage of extensive connections between KOLs (key opinion leaders) and audiences, along with the development of the logistics system. In particular, rural youth are becoming active and easily accessing the TikTok application, which is an opportunity to promote e-commerce of agricultural products.

Sharing opinions on taking advantage of third parties to bring farmers' agricultural products to consumers, Mr. Dao Duc Huan, Head of OCOP One Commune One Product Program Management Office (New Rural Coordination Office) Central Government) believes that this is a new solution in the context that the trend of agricultural products sold on e-commerce platforms is somewhat slowing down.

According to Mr. Huan, bringing OCOP products to e-commerce floors has slowed down in the past two years and maintaining OCOP products on sales channels faces many difficulties due to the product's seasonality and many barriers to consignment. , logistics, subjects find it difficult to adapt to e-commerce...

However, since TikTok Shop coordinated with the Agricultural Trade Promotion Center under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to increase support for small and medium-sized enterprises, cooperatives in digitizing trade promotion activities under With the "One Commune One Product" Program (OCOP), agricultural products are effectively promoted to consumers.

Explaining this success, Mr. Huan said that bringing agricultural products to a new e-commerce platform like TikTok Shop has many advantages such as optimizing the interaction between producers and consumers, taking advantage of understanding. of people with knowledge of new digital platforms to optimize product search efficiency and reach consumers... Current commercial floors are also following this trend. From there, train not only farmers who are the producers but also local people who have good influence and understand the products to promote agricultural products closer to consumers.

A representative of the Ministry of Information and Communications said that this can be called a "digital sales" force, which needs to be taken advantage of to open a new path away from the traditional trading floor. 

In early January 1, in Long Thoi commune, Cho Lach district, 2024 livestream sessions from four famous content creators on the TikTok platform took place under the program "Western Tet Market" coordinated by TikTok Vietnam. organized by local authorities. This livestream session had 4 million views on the platform, generating more than 19,5 orders. During the 5.000-hour livestream, 4 content creators sold more than 4 orders of Tien Giang sausages, 1.500 orders of ornamental plants for Huyen Linh seedling barn (Cho Lach) and more than 714 orders of kitchen meat.