Social Commerce, Acquaintance Networks, and Smallholder Income: The Case of Pinggu District Peach Farmers

1. Introduction

With the rapid development of the digital economy, agricultural e-commerce has become an important channel for agricultural product circulation and rural market integration [1,2]. Compared with traditional marketing systems centered on wholesale markets and intermediaries, e-commerce provides new opportunities for smallholder farmers to reach broader consumer markets, improve access to market information, and participate more directly in agricultural value chains [3,4,5]. In China, rural e-commerce has also been regarded as an important policy instrument for promoting agricultural product sales, linking smallholders with modern agriculture, and enabling rural households to share the benefits of digital development [6,7,8,9]. Existing studies suggest that rural e-commerce can reduce transaction costs, expand market access, and contribute to household income growth and inclusive employment opportunities [10,11,12,13]. However, these benefits are not automatically accessible to all smallholders. Many farmers still face barriers when entering e-commerce markets, including weak consumer trust in online agricultural products, difficulties in connecting with e-commerce supply chains, mismatches between small-scale production and diversified consumer demand, limited online operation capacity, and insufficient organizational coordination. As a result, smallholders often participate indirectly through intermediaries, enterprises, cooperatives, or other leading actors, remaining primary suppliers rather than independent market actors.

In recent years, the widespread use of mobile internet and social media has promoted the rapid development of social commerce, making it a new form of agricultural e-commerce. Social commerce integrates e-commerce and social networking, in which social interaction, user recommendations, trust mechanisms, and relationship-based communication play important roles in transactions [14,15,16,17,18]. In China, WeChat provides a low-threshold channel for smallholders to conduct online marketing and direct sales [19]. Other rapidly developing social-commerce modes in China include livestream marketing on Douyin, Kuaishou, and Taobao Live, which relies on algorithmic traffic, real-time product demonstrations, and host–viewer interaction to reach broad consumer groups [20,21]. Recent studies have further examined farmers’ adoption of agricultural livestreaming e-commerce and the roles of platform support, streamer characteristics, product attributes, and livestreaming scenes in shaping farmer participation and consumer engagement [22,23]. Compared with these livestreaming channels, WeChat-based direct marketing requires less investment in public-traffic acquisition and professional live operation and relies more strongly on private social networks, repeated communication, and pre-existing interpersonal trust, making it particularly suitable for smallholders and motivating this study’s specific focus on WeChat. Its distinctive feature lies in the embeddedness of transactions in an acquaintance society. Economic action is not isolated from social relations; market transactions are often embedded in social networks and shaped by trust, information flows, and relational constraints [22,23,24,25,26,27,28]. For fresh agricultural products, where quality is difficult to standardize and intrinsic attributes are not easily observed by consumers, information asymmetry is particularly strong [29,30]. WeChat-based direct marketing can transform offline acquaintance relationships into online customer networks, while trust and reputation constraints may reduce perceived quality risks, restrain opportunistic behavior, and support repeated transactions [31,32,33].

From the consumer perspective, trust is particularly important in social commerce because it reduces perceived quality and transaction risks and strengthens purchase intentions [14,18,31,32,33]. For fresh agricultural products, acquaintance-based communication, customer feedback, and reputation signals may help consumers evaluate product credibility when quality cannot be fully observed before purchase. A growing body of literature has examined rural e-commerce and farmers’ income. One strand of research focuses on how smallholders participate in e-commerce, suggesting that high platform entry costs, weak online operation capacity, limited digital skills, and insufficient supporting services often push smallholders toward indirect participation through enterprises, cooperatives, or e-commerce service providers. Studies on social capital and farmers’ e-commerce participation further show that social networks can affect farmers’ digital market entry, entrepreneurial behavior, and e-commerce performance [34,35]. Other studies on agricultural digitalization, digital divides, and digital skills suggest that farmers’ ability to use digital tools remains an important condition for effective participation in online markets [36,37,38,39,40]. Some studies also show that smallholders can participate directly through social media applications, forming farmer-to-consumer sales channels [41]. Evidence from Africa, South Asia, and Latin America also indicates that mobile communication, digital market information, and internet-based channels can reduce information frictions and improve farmers’ market access and price outcomes [42,43,44]. Another strand examines the income effects of rural e-commerce and finds that e-commerce can increase farmers’ income by expanding sales channels, reducing transaction costs, alleviating information asymmetry, improving bargaining power, and increasing the market value of agricultural products. A further strand discusses the practical barriers faced by smallholders in accessing e-commerce markets, including weak product standardization, limited online marketing ability, inadequate logistics conditions, and high costs of connecting with downstream distribution channels. For fresh agricultural products, studies on farmers’ markets, short food supply chains, alternative food networks, and local food systems further suggest that direct producer–consumer connections can help communicate product quality, origin, freshness, and local identity, thereby strengthening consumer trust and market value [42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50].

Although these studies provide an important basis for understanding rural e-commerce and farmers’ income growth, several issues remain underexplored. First, most existing studies treat rural e-commerce as a general phenomenon or focus mainly on platform-based e-commerce, while WeChat-based social commerce as a smallholder direct-marketing model has received less attention. Second, although many studies examine whether e-commerce increases farmers’ income, the selling-price mechanism through which WeChat-based direct marketing promotes income growth remains insufficiently examined. For fresh products such as peaches, income growth depends not only on whether farmers sell online, but also on whether they can obtain higher selling prices by bypassing intermediaries, matching differentiated consumer demand, and enhancing consumer trust. Third, the role of social network embeddedness in shaping heterogeneous income gains from social commerce has not been fully discussed.

To address these gaps, this study examines WeChat-based direct marketing among peach farmers in Pinggu District, Beijing, China. Pinggu peaches (Prunus persica (L.) Batsch) are a representative fresh agricultural product with strong regional characteristics, high quality heterogeneity, and high requirements for timely marketing, consumer trust, and logistics fulfillment. Based on field survey data collected from 724 peach-farming households in 2024, this study evaluates whether WeChat-based direct marketing increases smallholder income and further examines its underlying mechanism. Specifically, a benchmark regression model is first used to estimate the effect of WeChat-based direct marketing on farmers’ per capita net income from peach production. Propensity score matching and an instrumental variable approach are then employed to address potential selection bias and endogeneity. Several robustness checks are conducted, including replacing the dependent variable, using winsorized regression, and excluding special samples. Finally, this study tests whether WeChat-based direct marketing increases income by raising the average selling price of peaches and examines whether household social expenditure, which reflects farmers’ embeddedness in acquaintance society, affects this income effect.

This study contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it shifts the analytical focus from rural e-commerce in general or platform-based e-commerce to WeChat-based social commerce, providing micro-level evidence on a low-threshold direct-marketing model for smallholders. Second, it clarifies the mechanism underlying the income effect of e-commerce by examining whether WeChat-based direct marketing promotes income growth through price premiums. Third, it investigates whether farmers with different levels of embeddedness in acquaintance society benefit differently from WeChat-based direct marketing, thereby providing evidence on the inclusiveness and boundary conditions of social-commerce-based income growth. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 develops the mechanism analysis and research hypotheses. Section 3 describes the study area, data sources, variable measurement, and empirical strategy. Section 4 presents the empirical results. Section 5 discusses the main findings. Section 6 concludes and proposes policy implications.

2. Mechanism Analysis and Research Hypotheses

2.1. WeChat-Based Direct Marketing as a Social Commerce Model for Smallholders

WeChat (Tencent, Shenzhen, China)-based direct marketing refers to a social-commerce model in which smallholders use WeChat Moments, group chats, private messages, and friend-to-friend referrals to sell agricultural products directly to consumers. Unlike platform-based e-commerce, this model does not mainly depend on formal online stores, paid traffic, or complex platform rules. Instead, it relies on social interaction, acquaintance networks, private traffic, and relationship-based trust. For smallholders with limited digital skills, weak online operation capacity, and insufficient resources for platform-based marketing, WeChat-based direct marketing provides a relatively low-threshold way to enter digital markets [14,15,16,17,18,19,36,37,38,39,40,41]. In the case of peach farmers, its operational logic can be understood from the following four aspects. In the case of peach farmers, the operational logic of WeChat-based direct marketing is illustrated in Figure 1 and can be understood from the following four aspects.

Figure 1. WeChat-based direct marketing model for smallholders.

First, smallholders use WeChat to conduct business activities, thereby improving their e-commerce entrepreneurial capacity. In platform-based e-commerce, farmers often need to register stores, design product pages, purchase traffic, respond to platform rules, and maintain continuous online operations. These requirements may exceed the capacity of many small-scale farmers, especially where rural digital divides and unequal digital skills remain evident [36,37,38,39,40]. By contrast, WeChat-based direct marketing allows farmers to use familiar social media tools to publish peach information, display product quality, communicate with consumers, receive orders, and arrange delivery. Social media has been shown to provide direct marketers with opportunities to connect farmers and consumers, although lack of time and technical expertise may still constrain farmers’ active use of these channels [41]. In this way, farmers can conduct online marketing without fully entering formal e-commerce platforms. This reduces the initial cost of digital marketing and enables smallholders to participate in e-commerce within their familiar social and production environment.

Second, smallholders implement household intergenerational division of labor, thereby improving their production and marketing capacity. Smallholder households are usually organized around family labor. In peach production, older household members are often more familiar with orchard management, fruit thinning, bagging, harvesting, grading, and local trading practices, while younger members are generally more capable of using smartphones, WeChat, mobile payment, online communication, and express delivery services. WeChat-based direct marketing therefore makes it possible for household members to divide tasks between production and marketing. Older members continue to undertake orchard production and quality control, while younger members take responsibility for online promotion, customer communication, order processing, payment collection, and logistics coordination. This intergenerational cooperation helps smallholder households extend from the production stage to the sales stage and strengthens their ability to participate in agricultural value chains. Existing studies also show that agricultural digitalization is reshaping farmers’ production practices, information use, and marketing routines, while digital skills can affect farmers’ agricultural entrepreneurship by improving access to production credit, modern technologies, and social capital [36,37,38,39,40].

Third, smallholders embed commodity transactions in online acquaintance-based social networks, thereby improving their market transaction capacity. In traditional peach marketing, farmers often sell peaches to intermediaries and have limited direct contact