North China's Shanxi province will push through an e-commerce project in its rural areas, which will cover the province's 50 counties and at least 3,000 administrative villages, according to the province's department of commerce.
The initiative, which aims to promote e-commerce in rural areas, will focus on the construction of e-commerce service systems at the county and village levels this year.
At present, e-commerce development in rural areas is a hot issue. But the top priority is to remove obstacles caused by undeveloped logistics, said the head of the province's bureau department.
In order to enhance the logistics and distribution services in rural areas, the province will push local e-commerce platforms as well as domestic e-commerce giants to build operation service centers at the county level, as well as to set e-commerce service stations at the village level.
In 2014, China's e-commerce giant, Alibaba Group, launched a grassroots e-commerce initiative that plans to build 1,000 county-level operation centers and 100,000 village-level service stations within three to five years in China. Thirty counties in Shanxi province have applied for the plan. After an evaluation carried out by Alibaba and experts, it will start the construction of the first batch of e-commerce demonstration counties this May.
Moreover, Shanxi's e-commerce project in rural areas also includes training for e-commerce professionals and support for start-ups and e-commerce innovation.
