(Photo/Chinanews.com)

In recent years, fresh food has been growing within China’s e-commerce market, especially among the middle-aged and elderly, thanks to the widespread rise in smartphone use and mobile payment, Beijing Daily reported on April 10.

“I’m too tired to shop at a market after a day’s work,” a female customer surnamed Cui told Beijing Daily, adding “plus, the vegetables are not usually as fresh as those displayed in the morning.”

Cui now frequently orders fresh food on the internet. She explained that promotional sales are often available online, which allow people to buy some vegetables at a better price and get some coriander and spring onions for free.

The number of middle-aged and elderly Chinese customers who buy fresh vegetables on Ele.me, China’s second largest food delivery application, has increased by more than 500 percent in a period of little more than one year.

The sales volume of fresh food on Ele.me hit 100 million yuan ($15.6 million) last year, and more retailers opened online shops as many sellers achieved sales of several hundred thousand to over one million yuan, said a member of staff from the O2O app.

In Beijing, the average value of an order placed on Ele.me for vegetables is about 60 yuan ($9.4), according to the platform.

Statistics also indicate that online ordering is busiest between 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. each day, and vegetables and beans are the top sellers.

Li Jiankang’s stall is located deep inside a supermarket in Beijing’s Chaoyang district. With the online retail business, he completed almost 2,000 orders via the app in March, reaching online sales of nearly 140,000 yuan ($21,910) in a single month.

Like Li, many other offline vegetable stores have benefited from the fast-developing online retail sector.

Last year, total sales of fresh food in China reached 4.93 trillion yuan, quoting Euromonitor International, a Chinese strategic market research provider.

However, traditional supermarkets and offline stores contributed to the majority of the sales volume.

An analyst anticipated that business surrounding fresh food online has ample space to grow. Its sales can be expected to increase by hundreds of billions yearly, which will bring fundamental changes to traditional sales, with more e-commerce giants including JD.com expanding into this field.