The Impact of Leading Agricultural Product E-stores on the Business Performance of Local Smallholder E-stores:Leading or Crowding Out?
E-commerce for agricultural products has been considered as an effective way to empower smallholders to connect to a larger market Whether leading e-stores drive the development of smallholder e-stores is of great significance for promoting the inclusive growth of the rural digital economy.This paper utilizes the online sales data of 180,661 agricultural product e-stores from April 2016 to December 2019,to quantitatively evaluate the impact of leading agricultural product e-stores on the business performance of local smallholder e-stores.The results indicate that the greater the number of leading e-stores in an area is,the more it promotes the sales growth of local small agricultural product e-stores.The results remain robust across different sample scenarios and selection criteria for leading e-stores.The analysis also shows that the spillover effects of leading e-stores depend on how difficult the smallholder e-stores to receive,transform,and utilize them,and the smallholder e-stores mainly selling fresh agricultural products and large-scale e-stores benefit more from the leading stores.Furthermore,the analysis confirms that the environment of industrial agglomeration enhances the leading role of the leading e-stores.The leading e-stores increase the number of local active smallholder e-stores,improve the business performance of smallholders,and thus significantly increase agricultural product sales of local smallholder e-stores.The finding provides insights for making full use of the demonstrative and leading role of leading e-stores,and promoting the branding,standardization,and scaling up of the agricultural product e-commerce.
万方数据
维普
