Why is rural E-commerce successful? A sociological analysis of the mechanism for actualizing technological dividends

Abstract This article, based on the study of cases involving the application of e-commerce technology in Chinese rural areas, discusses the basic conditions for developing e-commerce villages and proposes a mechanism for actualizing the benefits of e-commerce technology. This study shows that the rise of e-commerce villages is due to two factors: on the one hand, the “differentiated demand market” engendered by e-commerce technology itself, and, on the other hand, the three mechanisms that result from the integration of e-commerce technology with rural industrial practices. The externality mechanism aggregates differentiated demands and reshapes the sales process of rural industries; the visibility mechanism displays the potential benefits of products and stimulates the intertwining of online trading information with rural interpersonal relationships; the verification mechanism uses a coded business process to help rural merchants accumulate internet capital. This study provides a sociotechnical analytical framework for examining the logic of rural industrial development in the digital age.