E-commerce industry booms in Yantai

Yantai, a coastal city in East China's Shandong province, is seeing rapid development in its e-commerce industry, with a significant increase in transactions year-on-year in the first six months of 2018.

E-commerce transactions in Yantai totaled 229.2 billion ($ 35.8 billion), up 30.5 percent year-on-year, according to official data. In the same period, the city's online retail sales reached 51.5 billion yuan, up 38.8 percent year-on-year.

Yantai city has launched an e-commerce public service platform which is expected to reach a total transaction value of 3 billion yuan in 2018. The government also has agreed partnership deals with some e-commercial giants, such as Alibaba, and JD.com.

"Yantai has cooperated with Tmall Fresh and established a complete product quality tracing system to standardize the cherry market," said Lu Shen, the director of Yantai municipal bureau of commerce.

E-commerce is proving to be a big boost to the fruit industry in Yantai. Yantai's Fushan district recently launched a promotion campaign tracing cherries from their point of origin to point of sale in the form of an online broadcast.

The e-commerce sector in Yantai is also playing a big role in the city's drive to alleviate and eliminate poverty. The city's government has cooperated with JD.com to launch an e-commerce training program to companies in the city's rural areas to promote the sales of agro products. Up to the end of June, it had launched a total of 30 training courses in the local countryside.

Yantai city will also make efforts to establish an e-commerce supply chain for featured agricultural products in the near future. It will coordinate with renowned e-commerce platforms to promote special agro products.