Jiang and his wife are just two of millions of agricultural e-commerce merchants contributing to what was a 422 billion yuan (US$63 billion) industry in China last year. The market has nearly tripled from 150 billion yuan in 2015.

At 36 years old, Jiang’s career change came with a big change in his environment. He went from managing production queues of precision instruments to working with logistics personnel and responding to clients on his smartphone. He also got to ditch his work uniform for a straw hat he uses to shield himself from the scorching sun while hiking through mountains to pick fruit, and filming it all for his online profiles.

“Brands are looking for ways to grow outside Alibaba’s platforms because the traffic there has reached the ceiling,” said Miro Li, founder of marketing consultancy Double V. Alibaba reported in March that it has 1.31 billion annual active consumers, just 90 million people shy of China’s entire population.

“Consumer habits are also changing,” Li added. “Douyin is a prime example of ‘interest e-commerce’, which drives sales with content, and consumers are less price-sensitive, instead of being focused on low prices with traditional e-tailers.”

To keep up with the trends, Jiang eventually opened a shop on Taobao and sold goods on Pinduoduo through a partner before Covid-19 hit in 2020. However, he found it too hard to attract traffic without paying promotional fees.

Unlike other parts of WeChat that restrict shared content to users’ contacts, Channels is a combination of private and public traffic because the videos can be viewed by strangers, said Jiang. In Chinese marketing, private traffic can be fully controlled by a seller, while public traffic is shared with a third party.

A WeChat group is commonly referred to as private traffic, whereas Douyin’s broader audience consists of public traffic. After using the latter, Jiang found that “anyone, anywhere – whether they’re from Yunnan Province, Heilongjiang province or abroad – could come across my video and ask me about prices”.

Jiang said he believes Douyin provides more value to users compared with other platforms he has used. “It provides data that includes views, likes, shares, although my numbers aren’t exactly high, but you’d roughly know the age and gender of your audience. This is something that Channels does not do,” he said.

Short videos and live-streaming have become the most popular marketing tactic in China’s hyper-competitive e-commerce environment. Pinduoduo, a leader in agricultural e-commerce, created its own short video feature in 2020 and earlier this year moved it to the platform’s landing page. It also began to lure more users with cash rewards.

Alibaba has been cashing in on live-streaming e-commerce as well. In 2020, that feature alone brought in US$60 billion in gross merchandise volume for the company.

Sleeping man, farmers ride wave of live-streaming popularity in China

Yang Lihua, a 58-year-old farmer on Xishan Island, only noticed the rise of e-commerce over the last two or three years, when she started seeing her fruit get more sales online thanks to distributors like Jiang.

Her day during the bayberry season normally starts at 4:30am, when she starts picking the fruit from the trees. While she typically stops in the afternoon, Yang said she will go back out if Jiang gets more orders.

“Without Covid, many tourists will come here and pick the fruit themselves, but they don’t dare come now,” she said. “All the sales of local fruits and tea are affected.”

Yang and her relatives have already picked more than one ton of bayberries this season, and Jiang could be responsible for selling half of it.

“I’m essentially an arbitrageur,” Jiang said. Although he also produces honey and grows loquats himself, most of the other local delicacies he sells – including bayberries, tea and prickly water lily – come from other farmers, who are decades older than he is and generally lack online marketing skills.

His initial vision was to “let farmers sell their goods without leaving the door”. However, realising this vision has left him at a disadvantage this year, as big wholesalers from outside Xishan swarmed to the region and bought directly from the farmers, leaving Jiang with little bargaining power.

Jiang generally sells his loquats by agreeing on a set price in advance through his sales channels outside Xishan. This year, his estimated costs were off the mark. He still fulfilled the orders, though, to maintain his relationships with his buyers.

The high price of packaging, increasing logistics fees, and an unusually short season this year have made it nearly impossible for Jiang to scale up his sales of loquats and bayberries.

Bayberries must be carefully placed in so-called Ferrero-style packaging that separates each fruit with a plastic dome, and they must be transported through cold-chain logistics. He sells each 2.5kg box for 198 yuan, a price that might be too expensive for budget-focused Pinduoduo.

Having come to terms with the limited manpower of his two-person operation, Jiang decided that his next goal should be to boost his profile on Douyin, where he currently has 13,000 followers.