Taobao Villages are helping farmers cash in online.
Taobao.com, China’s largest customer-to-customer (C2C) trading platform - roughly equivalent to the global auction site eBay - is taking China’s countryside by storm. As orders for fresh produce and local arts and crafts rockets in China’s urban cities, rural residents are rushing to meet demand.
A “Taobao Village”, according to the website’s parent Alibaba Group, is one in which over 10% of households run online stores and village e-commerce revenues exceed 10m yuan ($1.6m) per annum. There were 14 such villages in China last year and one of them, Wantou village in Shandong province, is already churning out millionaires.
An Baokang, a Wantou native, has made over 2m yuan ($326,800) selling hand woven household supplies, like straw tea tables and tatami, online. “Urban people revere a natural way of living, and I offer it to them with pure, natural crafts”, says the rural entrepreneur.
As well as attracting more visitors to An’s physical store, online trading is also helping the area’s twenty plus delivery companies prosper. According to Aliresearch, there were five billion transactions from Taobao Villages alone last year.
Almost half of China’s 1.3bn people are now online and the nation’s total e-commerce spend in 2012 reached a staggering 4.98tn yuan ($813bn).