Farmigo is an online agricultural marketing platform. Farmers can post their own products, people can directly purchase their favorite ingredients on it. Farmigo promises that fresh ingredients will be sent to the designated location within 48 hours, but the price is 20-30% cheaper than the supermarket.
In other words, Farmigo itself does not sell agricultural products, it just plays a platform intermediary role. Their advantages to attract consumers are fresh ingredients supply, home delivery and finally have a price advantage. For the farmers, Farmigo is a good sales channel, the money they can get is not less than they can get by selling products to supermarket.
Is online supplier of agricultural products feasible in China?
As the finalists of TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 Entrepreneurs Contest, the goal of Farmigo is to become the nation's largest agricultural product online trading platform. Farmigo mode is feasible in USA has relationship with the social and economic environment in United States. The reasons are : Firstly, farmers' products to the farm in the form of mass production, then large supermarket is far away from residential areas; lastly people are accustomed to using the Internet to go shopping.
China's national conditions indeed has some gap with the United States, but the gap is gradually reduced. Although the production of China's farmers are smallholders, but many active meat brands on the market proves the trend of aggregated production mode in China. Alibaba has announced that retail trading volume exceeded 1 trillion in 2012, we can see that people are willing to accept online shopping which is inline with developed world.
Some websites to sell agricultural products online have appeared in a number of cities, but they are not large-scale. They usually act as the sellers but not the agents, have no price advantage, target customers are young white-collar workers, in essence. The possibility of being big is very small and it is not troublesome for people buying food , the chance of survival of such sites is relative low.
What is the significance of online agricultural products supplier?
The key for delivering fresh food instead of driving to buy fresh food is competitive advantage because of difference. Start from this point, we can find a lot of valuable content, such as food quality. With the improvement of the economic, many families are no longer satisfied with the ordinary agricultural products, and the market demand for non-fertilizer fruits and vegetables, farm livestock increases rapidly.There is a lot of green farm coming into being, but the difficulties for these green farms are the lack of credibility and lack of large-scale sales channels, so it is usually difficult to make profit.
If there is a well-functioning green agricultural products online platform, the difference between green fresh food platform and local market is that green food platform can guarantee supply of green and healthy goods,
Will the difficulty of transporting and storage hinder the development of the online agricultural product platform?
Agricultural products have some characteristics which can not be ignored, they are not as easy to store as general merchandise. This is why Farmigo selects the "Community-Supported Agriculture(CSA)" mode, i.e. the demand of local products are supplied by local suppliers. Will the difficulty of transportation and storage become the stumbling block hindering the online supplier of agricultural products? This is just a question of value. Suppose a Beijing citizen wants to buy freshly picked wild matsutake from Shangri-La,, the distance is not a problem.
The emergence of the online business platform of agricultural products needs a more mature market than the current environment. There was a saying, today's China likes what the United States was a decade ago. We may not need to wait a decade for a mature market environment.
Source : http://www.36kr.com/p/200129.html
