During the hot summer in Qingzhou, Shandong, two fertilizer business owners have been busy hiring workers. Most of the new hires are women from surrounding villages—with the men working away from home, they hope to find jobs close to home while caring for their families.
At Chen Kaiqi's company, consultation calls ring non-stop, requiring more customer service staff to patiently explain scientific fertilization methods to farmers across the country. In Wan Zhiqiang's new workshop, production lines run continuously, with barrels of fertilizer rolling off the conveyor belts and being loaded for shipment.
"Our job requirements mainly involve machinery maintenance, bagging, and barrel filling. These are not heavy manual labor, and employees can earn several thousand yuan per month, which is quite good locally," said Wan Zhiqiang. "Moving forward, we plan to expand the hiring quota further."
The hiring surge is driven by booming order volumes. The customer structure for Chen Kaiqi's Huan Neng Fertilizer and Wan Zhiqiang's Nong Yi Ke Fertilizer is similar: 80% of Pinduoduo orders for the former come from individual farmers, while 80% of the latter's orders are from 'retail buyers' who purchase just one or two barrels at a time online.
Agricultural supplies, represented by fertilizer, are essential for agricultural production, constituting a significant portion of farmers' annual production costs. However, these needs were once hindered by the 'last few kilometers': a barrel of fertilizer can weigh tens of kilograms, making shipping costs for online purchases of one or two barrels prohibitively high, and in many remote villages, deliveries could only reach the town, not the village itself.
Since late last year, with Pinduoduo launching a 'free delivery to village' service pilot under its '100 Billion Support' plan, the online shopping experience for agricultural supplies like fertilizer has been further optimized. In pilot areas, farmers can place group orders on their phones and receive large barrels of fertilizer at the village entrance within days, eliminating the worry of how to transport such bulky packages from town.
The improved online shopping experience has helped unlock rural consumption potential. Agricultural supply manufacturers have also seized the opportunity to break down geographical barriers, expanding their markets to more remote villages, leading to simultaneous growth in production capacity, scale, and employment.
Challenges of Online Agricultural Supply Delivery to Villages
Chen Kaiqi, 35, is energetic and articulate. His eloquence and vigor stem from his previous role as a rural credit cooperative client manager. In 2013, when a relative's fertilizer factory was up for transfer, he spent six months researching before quitting his job and resolutely entering the agricultural supplies industry.
"For small and medium-sized enterprises like ours, the easiest path is to sell goods in bulk to large bases and distributors, shipping truckloads at a time," Chen Kaiqi said. "But I still wanted to serve individual farmers."
During his time as a client manager, he observed that for most rural families, there are few annual consumption items requiring a continuous investment of three to five thousand yuan, with fertilizer being one of the most significant. If they could only buy fertilizer from town agricultural supply stores at prices 50% or even more above the factory price, their farming profits would be significantly reduced.
Chen Kaiqi did the math. The manufacturer's profit on a barrel of fertilizer sold from the factory is roughly 10% to 15%. After markups by provincial agents, county-level wholesalers, and township retailers, a barrel costing around 70 yuan could be sold to farmers for 120 yuan or more.
To streamline the supply chain, he turned to e-commerce. In 2020, after opening a store on Pinduoduo, Chen quickly realized that the platform's users were precisely the 'retail buyers' with a rigid demand for good fertilizer that he wanted to serve.
The vision was promising, but new problems arose. "A barrel of fertilizer weighs 20 kilograms. At the time, courier companies had no policies for such large items," Chen Kaiqi recalled clearly. When starting online sales in 2020, the hardest part wasn't selling but shipping.
Couriers couldn't handle large items, so the company had to use logistics services, which only delivered to cities or county towns, still dozens of kilometers from farmers' doorsteps. This was not an isolated case.
In Qingzhou, a major domestic production base for water-soluble and new-type fertilizers, logistics once hindered the development of agricultural supply e-commerce. "We sell a barrel of fertilizer for just over 70 yuan, weighing 20 kilograms. Previously, shipping to six western provinces could cost up to 100 yuan," said Wan Zhiqiang, responsible for e-commerce operations at the local Nong Yi Ke company, which has been producing fertilizer for over 20 years.
He noted that online sales had risen year-on-year since 2019, but business development had a 'bug'—shipping costs for orders to remote areas like Qinghai and Gansu exceeded the product value, making it unsustainable. "Unless the volume was large enough for full truckload logistics, we couldn't accept small orders."
"Once we accepted a small order and promised delivery to the village, we had to deliver," Chen Kaiqi said. He tried building his own village delivery logistics system. At his own expense, after the fertilizer logistics truck arrived in the county town, he would hire additional vehicles to deliver orders one by one to villages.
"At the time, for a village 30 kilometers from the county town, the transport fee was about a hundred yuan. If the distance increased to fifty or sixty kilometers, it would cost two to three hundred yuan, all borne by us manufacturers," he explained. The increased transport costs sometimes led to losses.
"Before shipping, I would have customer service calculate the profit and cost for each order. For some regular customers, once we promised delivery, we had to deliver, even at a loss," Chen Kaiqi said.
Delivery to Village Reduces Costs and Expands Markets
Change began in 2022. Since then, benefiting from Pinduoduo's preferential policies for remote western regions like Tibet and Qinghai, including segmented transportation and transfer fee waivers, platform merchants could send parcels west to transit warehouses in places like Xi'an and Chengdu. The platform then handled the second leg of transportation and fully covered the transfer fees.
This change showed Chen Kaiqi the potential to grow agricultural supply e-commerce. The further breakthrough came with Pinduoduo's 'free delivery to village' service pilot launched late last year. In covered service areas, parcels that previously only reached towns can now be delivered directly to villages.
"Previously, our own village deliveries kept costs high. Now, with the platform covering these expenses, our burden and pressure are reduced," Chen Kaiqi said. Wan Zhiqiang shared the sentiment.
After the 'e-commerce westward expansion' policy was implemented, for orders to Tibet, they only had to bear the shipping cost of less than 30 yuan from Qingzhou to the Chengdu transit warehouse, cutting costs by 70%. Consequently, they gained the ability to offer free shipping services to farmers in these regions.
This fulfillment upgrade quickly spurred order growth. "Recently, the implementation of the 'free delivery to village' service has triggered a similar positive effect. In some remote southwestern regions, order growth has reached 30% to 40%," Wan Zhiqiang said.
Chen Kaiqi estimated that his store's sales conversion rate recently increased by 70% to 80%. In just one pilot area, Guangxi, the company now sells about 50 more orders daily than before. Calculating with an average order value of 150 yuan and eight months of sales per year, the sales growth from 'free delivery to village' could reach 1 to 2 million yuan.
It is understood that many areas in Guangxi have developed fruit cultivation, mainly sugarcane and citrus. However, in the past, mountainous terrain hindered courier delivery to villages. The inconvenience of picking up parcels discouraged farmers from buying fertilizer online. The pilot implementation of Pinduoduo's 'free delivery to village' service has stimulated the release of this demand.
"We make fertilizer; our users are farmers, who live in villages, and the land is in villages. Opening up village delivery logistics is like pushing open the last door to the market," Chen Kaiqi said. As goods reach more customers, brand reputation has gradually grown, with the online store's repurchase rate now between 30% and 40%.
"Many customers initially buy just one product, then gradually expand to a dozen, and eventually even use our entire fertilizer system."
"Previously, constrained by logistics, we weren't sure about sustainable growth. Now, with an increasingly stable market, we have the confidence to expand production," Wan Zhiqiang noted. The continuously improving logistics network has enabled Nong Yi Ke to invest in long-term construction.
Last year, they commissioned a self-operated production factory covering over 5,000 square meters, adding three liquid and three powder production lines, tripling or quadrupling daily shipment volumes. This year, they built a new laboratory, planning to offer soil testing services for clients in specific regions and adjust fertilizer formulas based on the results.
"We have 20 mu of experimental fields. A fertilizer product undergoes at least one full planting cycle of testing from R&D to launch. Next, we want to combine this data with the actual soil conditions of farmers' fields to create more precise products," Wan Zhiqiang stated. The premise for this plan is that customers in remote areas can reliably receive goods, and the company can consistently obtain their feedback. Without functional logistics, none of this would be possible.
Chen Kaiqi has a similar approach. He is already trying to optimize products for different provinces: saline-alkali soil in Inner Mongolia requires strongly acidic fertilizer; acidic soil in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou needs neutral fertilizer to balance pH.
"E-commerce faces a national farmer base. Soil varies, crops vary; solanaceous plants and fruit trees are different, leafy vegetables and solanaceous plants are different. In the past, we didn't dare make targeted products, only broad-spectrum ones. But now, we want to give it a try," Chen Kaiqi said.
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