Just a few years ago, Yang, a 48-year-old former railway worker,
rarely gave the Internet a second thought. Then she spent three
years struggling to keep her small retail outlet solvent. She
experimented with different types of inventory, but rent, stock and
utilities alone cost her about 5,000 yuan (US$602) a month. Profits
were meager at best.
Yang began to run a "virtual" store online last year with an
investment of a mere 100 yuan (US$12). Now the business is booking
monthly sales of several thousand yuan and Yang is planning to
expand from daily necessities into toys and jewelry.
More than 1,000 people in Shanghai have launched full-time
careers in e-commerce since last July, when the local labor and
social welfare authorities and the municipal e-commerce trade union
launched a campaign to boost employment with Internet services.
The online business operators trade in cosmetics, clothing,
accessories and footwear, digital cameras, cell phones, computers,
audio-visual products and books.
Another 3,000 citizens have taken training in starting up an
online business.
The trade union said that in 2003, e-commerce in Shanghai nearly
doubled year-on-year to reach 50.4 billion yuan (US$6.1 billion),
with virtual stores and online-franchised businesses quickly
gaining in popularity.
Eachnet, a well-established e-commerce website based in
Shanghai, registered more than 1,500 full-time online store
startups, and jobs offered by the virtual stores now number more
than 5,000. Including the e-stores operating only part-time, the
number of online shops that started last year through Eachnet
topped 50,000, according to the trade union.
Tang Lei, Eachnet's public relations manager says that online
store operators can realize monthly turnover of 20,000 to 30,000
yuan (US$2,409 to US$3,614) with an average profit margin of 50
percent.
Meanwhile, another Shanghai-based e-commerce service provider
specializing in electronics opened more than 30 online franchised
stores over the past year, and says it has another 100
applications.
Zhao, a 50-year-old retiree from a local textile factory, raked
in as much as 150,000 yuan (US$18,072) in monthly turnover from the
franchised electronics operation.
Dubbed "grassroots e-commerce," online business startups have
won favor with young college graduates as well as the middle-aged
unemployed.
Xu, who was a Chinese language and literature major at the
prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai, has opened an online
store selling cosmetics. She is recording monthly sales of more
than 10,000 yuan (US$1,204).
Low startup costs are one of the decisive factors behind the
uptrend in grassroots e-commerce, said Yi Yong, head of the local
e-commerce trade union.
Starting an online store costs roughly one-tenth of what it does
to start a conventional small business, such as a purified water
shop or a launderette.
The 100 e-commerce enterprises incorporated in Shanghai are now
encouraged to reserve jobs for people trained by the municipal
e-commerce trade union. Those who do so will be eligible for
benefits from the municipal reemployment program, said Zhou
Weidong, head of the Shanghai Commission for Building an IT-based
Society.
Shanghai seeks to provide 500,000 jobs for the laid-off every
year. The grassroots e-commerce campaign is expected to provide
10,000 jobs by the end of this year.
To achieve the goal, some regulatory barriers must be removed,
according to Zhou. He cited an absence of e-commerce regulations,
which is a hindrance to massive expansion. Without such rules, it
is difficult to certify the legitimacy of an online transaction,
Zhou said.
Inadequate and unqualified management is another obstacle to
e-commerce growth, said a company official in the industry.
Currently, most of the operators are laid-off or retired people who
are not well educated.
(China Daily May 25, 2004)