Recently, the Ministry of Commerce and 7 other departments jointly issued the “Notice on Launching Actions to Promote the Small Store Economy”, which proposes to “support e-commerce platforms to provide digital services such as wholesale, advertising and marketing, mobile payment, data analysis, and software systems for small stores, and encourage ways to reduce commissions and basic service fees by lowering the threshold and developing value-added services to reduce commissions and basic service fees, and reduce the information costs and operating burden of small stores.”

According to information, many Internet platforms serving small stores are currently active. Among them, Alibaba Retail Connect has reached 1.5 million users, making it the B2B FMCG platform with the largest coverage of small stores. Its service capabilities include all the services and support for small stores proposed in the “Notice”.

Established in 2016, Retail Connect has grown from the original one-stop ordering platform to a digital business operating system for small stores, providing full-link services such as products, marketing, financial support, and big data analysis for small stores, and has become the number one platform for promoting the digital transformation of small stores. Of the 200,000 small stores that have gone through the digital transformation of retail channels, thousands have annual profits of over one million yuan.

“After 4 years of development, Retail Connect has moved from expanding scale and improving efficiency to a new stage of creating value for small stores.” Lin Xiaohai, vice president of Ali Group and general manager of the Retail Connect Division, said.

At the beginning of this year, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic, Retail Connect launched targeted small store rescue measures and mobilized 200 brands to form a “Protect Small Stores and Secure Employment” alliance to achieve continuous delivery without price increases, and steadily covered 21 provinces, 193 cities, and 13,370 townships across the country, providing strong support for the supply of necessities of life and epidemic prevention materials.

During the epidemic, Retail Connect distributed more than 100 million purchased packages to 500,000 small community stores, supplying 2.5 billion yuan of daily necessities for residents, including nearly 1.5 million orders for rice, noodles, cereals, oils, and convenient fast food products. The 500-meter living materials support circle for residents one by one has become “home supply stations” for ordinary people, and many small stores have become anti-epidemic heroes.

The Ministry of Commerce's “Notice” indicates that currently small stores are still facing problems such as high cost of living, difficult and expensive financing. The “Small Store Economic Recovery Plan” released by Retail Connect is preparing to invest 100 billion dollars in high-quality supplies to millions of small stores, and launch zero-interest loans and interest-free credit purchases of up to 100,000 yuan to every small store in the Hubei region. Chen Xingmei, head of retail sales in the Edong region, said that the overall performance of small stores in Hubei covered by the recovery plan increased 180% compared to February.

On June 3 of this year, Zhang Xiang, deputy director of the Distribution Development Department of the Ministry of Commerce, visited a small Tmall store in Hangzhou and praised the retail digital technology for bringing about the small store revolution, “contributing to small stores and society.”

“The most critical thing is to help small store managers develop digital viability.” Lin Xiaohai said that more resources will be invested to help transform small stores, so that more and more small stores can achieve the convenience, specialization, and digitalization proposed in the “Notice”.