Has COVID-19 accelerated the E-commerce of agricultural products? Evidence from sales data of E-stores in China

• Published in: Food policy 2022-10, Vol.112, p.102377, Article 102377
• Main Authors: Guo, Jianxin, Jin, Songqing, Zhao, Jichun, Wang, Hongbiao, Zhao, Fang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agricultural products; China; COVID-19; Difference-in-difference; E-commerce; Resilience of the supply chain
• ISSN: 0306-9192; 1873-5657; 0306-9192
• DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2022.102377

•The study is based on sales data from 164,000 agricultural products e-commerce stores of two major Chinese e-commerce platforms in 120 cities.•The difference-in-difference (DID) results show that the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with a significant growth of online sale of agricultural products.•The micro e-stores experienced the largest growth in online sale than larger scale e-stores.•Fresh agricultural products with high repurchase frequency and high degree of perishability experienced a larger growth in online sale.•We also find a significant drop in the number of new e-stores, and a sharp rise in the number of e-stores closed.•The increase in the quantity of customer orders and quantity of the customer unit order are the main drivers for the growth of online sales of agricultural products. We investigated the operation of e-stores specializing in food and agricultural products before and after the occurrence of COVID-19. A difference-in-difference (DID) method was employed to estimate the relationship between COVID-19 and the online sales of agricultural products using data from 164,002 food and agricultural product e-commerce stores (in short, e-stores) of two major Chinese e-commerce platforms in 120 prefectural-level or above cities. The results demonstrated that while COVID-19 and its control measures were associated with a substantial growth in the monthly sales of food and agricultural product e-stores, the growth varies considerably across store scales and with the type of food and agricultural product in which an e-store is specialized. Micro stores experienced much larger growth and played a more important role in maintaining the resilience of the supply chain of food and agricultural products than larger-scale stores; stores selling more essential food items experienced larger growth than those selling leisure food items. A mechanism analysis further revealed that the growth of online sales of agricultural products was mainly driven by changes in consumers’ food purchase behaviors from offline channels to online channels (i.e., an increase in the number of online customer orders and price per online order) starting with the onset of COVID-19. The results of this paper underscore the importance of e-commerce in maintaining the resilience of the agri-food supply chain and call for public support of the development of micro- and small-scale e-stores to meet consumers’ increasing demand for food supply from those types of stores during the p