B2C e-commerce giant JD.com announced that they will develop opportunities in the huge Chinese rural market and plan to open physical specialty stores in 10,000 towns in 2016.

According to reports in Chinese local media, Yan Xiaobing, JD Group's vice president and president of the home appliances business unit, said that JD achieved a large growth by developing in the rural market and its home appliances business held nearly 30% share of the Chinese rural market. They aim to increase the ratio to 50% in 2016.

Yan revealed that JD will adopt the franchising model and serve the existing rural home appliances stores which want to transform to an O2O model. JD's home appliances specialty stores will be opened by towns, and each town will have only one such store to realize regional protection. JD will provide various services to those specialty stores, including warehousing, delivery, installation, and maintenance; while its franchisees only need to focus on sales.

With those specialty stores, JD will break the layers of price increases of traditional channels and regional price fixing to realize unified retail prices across the country, allowing rural consumers to enjoy the same products, services and prices as consumers in cities.