"My hometown is one of the top 100 counties in China for apple production; apples are everyone's business here. But how to sell them at a better price remains a key challenge for us." Said Mrs Zhang Tanglin, a recent graduate from Xi'an University of Science and Technology. She came back to Fufeng, her hometown, together with her husband, to set up their own apple business. They started their own e-store last year and the business went so well that their store became the very first group as partners for Taobao--China's largest e-commerce platform. They sell not only apples from their garden, but also purchased ones from the town. So far a total of 80.000 kilos have been sold out.
Fufeng is one of the most important counties for apples in China, and it has been listed as a protected national origin of products. With a plantation area of 16,000 hectares, Fufeng's apple revenue accounts for over 1.6 billion Yuan. Impacted by the increased apple supply and the overal slowing down of the economy, the apple sales this year are slower than previous years. In order to help the apple growers, the local goverment has issued guidance to establish high-standard cultivation gardens, and help them sell their fruits through wechat or other e-commerce platforms.
Fufeng county started its e-commerce promotion and training session this year, and over 3,000 villagers from 8 small towns in Fufeng have received a total of 12 training sessions. After this over 100 e-commerce stores and over 20 logistic companies have been established. Moreover, a total of 59 Taobao service points were built, as a result, a large amount of top quality apples are sold through e-commerce platforms across the whole of China, which serves as a very good complementary channel for offline sales. Now over 5 million kilos of apples have been sold online.
