Cai Jia from Beijing has been busy purchasing goods for the upcoming Spring Festival. This year, she bought a large amount of imported seafood from supermarkets near her home.

Business women show imported products at the Greenland Global Commodity Trading Hub in Shanghai. (Photo/Xinhua)

“It has become increasingly convenient for us costumers to taste food from around the world,” she said. Like Cai, many Chinese consumers are enjoying the convenience brought by expanded imports.

China has been taking proactive measures to expand imports, which has provided a wider range of choices for consumers, and satisfied their need for more personal, diversified and different consumption.

Take online marketplace JD.com as an example. During the days before the Spring Festival, the platform saw a 30 percent increase in purchases of imported goods by consumers from Sichuan, Liaoning, Hubei, Hebei and Henan provinces. The sales value of imported baby formula, food supplements and bath products increased more than threefold.

Statistics by JD.com indicated that imported bananas and longans and Chilean cherries enjoyed the highest sales volume among imported fruits, and expenditure on imported products in third-tier cities and below increased by 9.8 times.

Thanks to e-commerce, more and more rural products are now available to urban consumers.

Li Wenjie is a teacher from Changsha in central China’s Hunan province. Recently, she bought walnuts and edible fungus from a mountainous area in the province. According to her, the products were of high quality.

In the past, agricultural products could not reach the city due to the incomplete logistics network. In recent years, with the logistics infrastructure upgraded, agricultural products have entered the city, becoming a new option for urban consumers and a strong source of income for farmers.

Tmall plans to sell 150 million kilograms of agricultural products for farmers across the country through the local products channel launched for Spring Festival shopping.

If that target is achieved, the platform is expected to increase incomes by 1,000 yuan for each participating farmer before the Spring Festival.

Statistics by Tmall show that in 2019, about 80,000 people from impoverished counties opened stores on Tmall to sell their products, and the average annual income generated by the shops surpassed 82,000 yuan.