Research On Regional Differences Of Seafood E-commerce Based On The Spatial Perspective

China has a vast sea area and abundant marine fishery resources,it is also a big consumer of seafoods.The domestic market demand for seafoods and aquatic products is increasing year by year,seafood plays an important role in national economy and residents’ daily life.However,due to the limitation of the characteristics of seafood,such as perishability,the cost of storage and distribution is very high,and thus the circulation space is greatly limited.Since the outbreak of COVID-19,traditional circulation channels have been greatly impacted.Facing the severe challenge of COVID-19,e-commerce has provided strong support for consumption growth and realizing the domestic economic cycle.E-commerce is the inevitable trend of future commercial development.Since 2013,China has become the world’s largest online retail market.As of June 2020,the number of online shopping users has reached 749 million.Cross-border e-commerce,agricultural product e-commerce,fresh food e-commerce and other new models promote traditional industry transformation,consumption return and agricultural products upward.How to use e-commerce to expand the sales of seafoods and promote the transformation and upgrading of marine fisheries is a topic that needs in-depth research.Taking the Alibaba platform as an example,this paper uses quantitative analysis methods such as regression analysis,index analysis and DEA efficiency analysis to quantitatively analyze the influencing factors,spatial distribution characteristics,development level and regional differences of marine products in 11 coastal provinces in China,from provinces to sea areas,part to the whole,comprehensively compare the development characteristics of seafood e-commerce in various regions.The first chapter introduces the development status and difficulties of China’s marine aquatic products and marine product circulation,leads to the development of e-commerce to improve the sales efficiency of seafoods,and explains the research purpose and significance,research content and methods,technical routes,innovation points and deficiencies.The second chapter introduces the research status and related theories.As there are few researches on seafood e-commerce,it needs to be sorted out from a wider range of aquatic product e-commerce.Therefore,literature review and related theories are reviewed from the aspects of aquatic product e-commerce,regional e-commerce,regional industrial agglomeration,and spatial autocorrelation,then make a research review based on the combing results.The development of seafood e-commerce should be studied in depth from the perspective of regional economy,comprehensive use of index evaluation,DEA model and other methods to compare the spatial characteristics and regional differences of seafood e-commerce in various regions.The third chapter uses regression analysis to study the influencing factors of the development of seafood e-commerce,seven indicators were selected from the three aspects of industrial foundation,cold chain logistics and market scale to bring them into the model for analysis.The study found,the development level of aquatic product processing industry,the development level of express logistics industry,the consumption capacity of residents,the number of aquatic product cold storages and the mileage of highways have a significant positive impact on the development of e-commerce in seafoods.The number of cold storages for aquatic products and the mileage of expressways have a greater impact,while the size of the urban population has not had a positive impact on the development of e-commerce for seafood.The fourth chapter studies the spatial distribution characteristics of seafood e-commerce,using the global Moran’s I index and location Gini index to measure the spatial agglomeration of marine products e-commerce in coastal areas,using E-index to calculate the comprehensive development level of marine products e-commerce in various provinces and cities.The study found,there is a significant positive autocorrelation and agglomeration effect in the development of seafood e-commerce in coastal areas.The number of business entities and online products presents a pattern of more in the east and less in the north and south.In terms of development level,the comprehensive development level of the eastern coastal area is high,and the comprehensive development level of the northern coastal area and the southern coastal area is low.The fifth chapter uses DEA data envelopment analysis to evaluate the efficiency of seafood e-commerce in various provinces and cities,and conducts typical analysis of provinces and cities with slack output and redundant elements.The study found,except for Liaoning Province,Shandong Province and Zhejiang Province,all other provinces are in the stage of comprehensive efficiency non-DEA effective.Most provinces need to adjust the scale of operation and improve the operation capacity to improve the e-commerce development level of marine products.Among them,Jiangsu Province,Shanghai,and Guangdong Province are in the stage of diminishing returns to scale and need to optimize factor inputs and improve business capabilities,while Tianjin,Hebei,Fujian,Guangxi and Hainan are in the stage of increasing returns to scale and need to expand factor inputs to increase output.The sixth chapter uses the coefficient of variation,Theil-entropy and the rank-scale rule to compare the regional differences in the development of seafood e-commerce in various sea areas based on the analysis results above.The study found,the business entities of each sea area showed the primacy distribution,and the e-commerce development level of marine products in various sea areas shows unbalanced characteristics.The economically developed eastern coastal areas have large absolute differences and small relative differences,while the economy relatively backward northern coastal areas and southern coastal areas have small absolute differences,but relatively large differences.The comprehensive efficiency of seafood e-commerce at the sea area level is significantly better than that of individual provinces.In conclusion,firstly,consumption of seafoods through traditional distribution channels is still the mainstream choice,and the differentiated needs of consumers in coastal areas have not been met.Urban population density has not had a positive impact on the development of seafood e-commerce,although increased consumption capacity will increase the demand for seafoods on e-commerce platforms,the increase in population size cannot cause an increase in the demand for seafoods.Operators should establish branding and differentiated advantages of seafoods on the e-commerce platform from the product perspective,and enhance the competitiveness and attractiveness of core products.At the same time,relevant government departments should increase the supervision of seafoods on e-commerce platforms,strictly control the quality and safety of the supply side,eliminate consumers’ food safety concerns.Secondly,the operator of seafood e-commerce business shows obvious regional agglomeration characteristics.The high-level seafood e-commerce business operators are concentrated in the economically developed eastern coastal area,forming a belt-shaped agglomeration area from north to south,and the operator of seafood e-commerce business in each sea area is present.Moreover,the e-commerce business entities of seafoods in each sea area show the characteristics of different degrees of primary distribution.Therefore,economically underdeveloped regions should give full play to their own advantages in labor costs,increase investment in e-commerce talent training,introduce e-commerce professionals,improve e-commerce operations and management capabilities,optimize and adjust industrial structure,and vigorously develop the seafood processing industry and cold chain logistics industry,to shorten the gap with the eastern developed coastal areas.Thirdly,the overall efficiency of seafood e-commerce in coastal areas is low,the DEA efficiency of seafood e-commerce at the sea area level is significantly better than the DEA efficiency of marine products e-commerce in independent provinces.In addition,the seafood e-commerce in some provinces has fallen into diminishing returns to scale.Seafood e-commerce operators needs to improve the efficiency of business operations by optimizing the combination of factor input and resource allocation.Governments should actively take the lead in building a regional marine product e-commerce exchange platform to promote the cross-regional development of seafood e-commerce.