Xixia thrives during e-commerce shopping festival

Double 11 Singles' Day, literally “bare sticks day,” which falls on Nov 11, was originally chosen by a certain group of young people to celebrate being single. The festival has become an online shopping spree for Chinese netizens in recent years, after the e-commerce giant Alibaba Group launched the Double 11 Global Shopping Festival.

Xixia county in Nanyang, Henan province seized this commercial opportunities and saw an animated market during the festival.

Jin Dongliang, manager of Jiabao Foods Limited in Xixia, a company that started selling products online earlier this year, was busy guiding workers to pack products for delivery when local reporters paid him a visit.

“Our company has received more than 30,000 orders during the festival,” he told the reporters.

Zhou Nan, a mushroom producer who received related training in June and registered her own account on Taobao, China's most widely used online shopping platform, was also busy responding to online orders from around the country.

“My family has planted over 1,000 bags of mushrooms this year. We sell the mushrooms through Taobao, and I can earn money and take care of my child at the same time.”

As one of China's main production areas for mushrooms, Xixia is known as “the county of mushrooms” with 15 townships made up of 110 villages growing mushrooms, and 173 mushroom production bases.

In recent years, Xixia has developed numerous mushroom products such as dried mushrooms, freshly preserved mushrooms and mushroom cans, exporting the products to overseas markets, including countries within the European Union, Southeast Asia countries, Japan and South Korea, all through the Internet.

In addition, the local government has established an e-commerce incubation park, and introduced a big data and information platform to promote the e-commerce industry.

“The local government's support for the e-commerce industry provided me a good opportunity to start my business,” said Wang Xiaomei, a local e-commerce entrepreneurs.

Statistics show that Xixia has trained 2,521 e-commerce entrepreneurs and introduced some 600 e-commerce companies. Over the first nine months, the county has earned 2.43 billion yuan ($355 million) through e-commerce trade.