With the development of e-commerce, many goods can be sold online. Even many foods have entered e-commerce, and many merchants have launched online food supermarkets. Large online food supermarket network, Wal-Mart, etc.

E-commerce does have many advantages, but it certainly has many disadvantages and shortcomings, which will make food e-commerce face many challenges. Here are some of the challenges it faces.

1, quality problem

As food, the most important thing should be quality. Without quality assurance, it is difficult to survive in a physical store, let alone a virtual store like an e-commerce. In real shops, people can see real goods with their own eyes. If they find quality problems, people can not buy them. However, in virtual stores, it is often difficult for people to see real goods. They can only see the goods through online publicity materials, and only see the samples of the goods. If customers buy goods online and find quality problems, it is difficult to exchange or return them. So selling food online will face such quality challenges. The most important thing in e-commerce is to gain the trust of consumers. If consumers find that the goods have quality problems, they will think that you have no integrity and you have cheated him. Once cheated, he will lose confidence in your store and won't come to your store to purchase goods again. Your trust will decline. Once customers lose confidence, you will lose customers and your store will face trust problems. Trust is the cornerstone of cooperation between the two parties, and integrity is the foundation of enterprise survival. Only mutual trust can create brilliance.

For all goods, in a virtual community like the Internet, there are many goods that can guarantee the quality, and the quality assurance of his goods can be realized. But goods like food are sold online, and the quality of food is difficult to guarantee. Because food is a commodity, many things are amorphous, unstable in shape and prone to quality problems, so the quality of many things is difficult to guarantee.

2. Time problem

In real stores, people can see and experience goods with their own eyes. Once their personal needs are met, they can buy immediately, shortening the time from purchase to spot, and customers will soon have the goods they need. In the e-commerce environment, customers need to wait for a long time, especially food. The utility of food to people is itself direct. What people want is to buy food that meets the needs of the moment, that is, to buy it when it is needed immediately. In e-commerce, it takes some time for customers to receive food after they buy it. Now that the customer has bought food, he can't get it right away, and his immediate needs can't be met. By the time the food is served, this sense of immediacy may no longer exist, or he may not be satisfied with this food. At this time, he may need another kind of food to satisfy. In terms of time, it is difficult for online food to meet customers' immediate psychological needs, so customers don't like online food. Online food sales are facing such a time problem.

3, packaging problems

In a tangible store, customers can take the goods away with a convenient bag without other packaging. But online stores are different, because goods need to be transported to reach customers. In logistics, goods need to be packaged, and only packaged goods can be easily transported. Therefore, packaging is a more important link in e-commerce logistics. Such as electronic products, clothing, etc. It is relatively easy to package goods with a certain fixed shape, but it is difficult to package goods such as food because there is no fixed shape and time limit. For a commodity without a fixed shape, there is no certain packaging module, and a fixed packaging form cannot be used, which requires differentiated packaging. So it is difficult to package in a unified form. This brings many difficulties to the selection of packaging materials. Online shopping for food is also time-limited. Poor packaging will not guarantee the quality of food for a certain period of time, which will bring challenges to the quality of food. Because the shelf life of food is relatively short compared with other commodities, if the quality problems of food are caused by packaging problems during the shelf life, it will have a great impact on the reputation of enterprises.

4. Logistics issues

For food, the freshness of food is the most important. If you go to a tangible store, you will eat relatively fresh food. What everyone wants to eat is fresh food. But online food is different. Even the dishes taken that day can't be very fresh, because he needs to make the raw materials into dishes, and then they can be delivered after certain processing and packaging. It takes a long time from delivery to receipt of the goods. Food preservation also has a certain time limit. How long food can be kept depends on the food. Different foods have different storage times. Generally speaking, most foods don't keep fresh for long. Therefore, when food can be delivered to customers, transportation is the key.

For example, the "online food supermarket" sells fresh zongzi. "Online food supermarket" only recommends buyers from Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, which means that food is limited by time, geographical factors, logistics costs and other conditions. In far away places, it is difficult to deliver food to customers within the fresh-keeping time. Even if the food can be delivered to customers within the fresh-keeping time, the logistics cost is very high. If customers can buy food with little money, but the logistics cost is far higher than the price of food. In this case, it is generally impossible for customers to buy it unless it is indispensable food or very rich, regardless of the amount.

Moreover, although the return rate of food and other commodities is very low, it will be a very troublesome thing once the return occurs. In a real store, if customers are not satisfied with the food, they can not buy it, but online is a virtual community where all the food can be seen, but this is impossible. Once the customer buys it home and finds it unsatisfactory, it will be troublesome to return it. This may bring many problems such as quality and logistics. Not only lost customers, enterprises will also directly cause many economic losses.

In short, in addition to the above challenges, online food sales are also facing many challenges. Therefore, most of the goods sold online are electronic products, products with fixed shapes, products with stable performance, products with high technology content, and products with prices far higher than logistics costs. The food department is perfect for online sales. It would be more appropriate to sell it in a real food store.