The digital transformation of specialty agricultural products through e-commerce has become a critical pathway for rural revitalization in China. However, many geographically indicated products face a persistent dilemma known as “high quality without premium pricing”. This issue arises from a structural disconnect between production and consumption. This study investigates the e-commerce transition of Jinhua bergamot (Citrus medica “Fingered”), a nationally recognized geographical indication product with nearly a millennium of cultivation history, under the analytical lens of a “dual divide” framework. We argue that the e-commerce performance of specialty agricultural products is jointly constrained by two interconnected gaps: the producer digital literacy divide (farmers’ insufficient capacity to engage in online marketing) and the consumer cognitive divide (consumers’ limited awareness and trust regarding the product’s value). This research adopts a mixed-methods design that includes a survey of 509 respondents, semi-structured interviews with more than 30 stakeholders, and multiple quantitative analytical tools. The adopted tools cover descriptive statistics, TwoStep clustering, Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) regression, and structural equation modeling (SEM). With these methods, we systematically analyze the supply-demand imbalance within the e-commerce ecosystem of Jinhua bergamot. Empirical results show only 7.0% of consumers can fully grasp the functional and cultural value of bergamot, 62.0% cannot recognize local related brands, and more than 60.0% fail to distinguish Jinhua bergamot from bergamot produced in other competing regions. From the supply side, farmers are highly willing to join e-commerce operations but lack comprehensive operational capabilities across the whole digital industrial chain. Our SEM results identify product cognition, brand trust, and channel convenience as core mediating factors of purchase intention, and these three variables together explain 68.3% of the variance in purchase intention. Based on the above results, we put forward an integrated development path built on brand empowerment, digital skill training, multi-stakeholder cooperation, and cultural value embedding. This study constructs a “dual divide” analytical framework to enrich existing literature on rural e-commerce, and it provides operable suggestions for geographically indicated specialty agricultural products undergoing digital transformation.
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Share and Cite
Zhu, M., Wan, W., Xu, S., Li, Q. (2026) Bridging the Dual Divide: E-commerce Transformation of Specialty Agricultural Products – A Case Study of Jinhua Bergamot. Hong Kong Financial Bulletin, 2(1), 38-56.