Yiwu in eastern China's Zhejiang Province has not only won world fame as an international distribution hub for small commodities, but has also brought business opportunities to local farmers through development of e-commerce.

Yiwu's Qingyanliu Village, which is praised as China's No. 1 "e-commerce village", is home to over 1,000 permanent residents and nearly 2,000 online shops. It recorded more than 800 million yuan (121.2 million U.S. dollars) in online sales in 2009.

The online shops, which are engaged in selling such daily-used merchandise as scarves, toys and lamps, have also attracted some 20 express delivery companies and more than 7,000 workers and business people from other parts of the country.

"Starting up a business on the Internet has helped change livelihoods and lifestyles of local farmers. They have gotten used to computer keyboard and mouse," Liu Wengao, deputy head of the e-commerce association of Jiangdong community in Yiwu, told Xinhua.

In order to ensure that small online businesses can find sources for commodities inside the village, a special supermarket tailored to the online shops was established at Qingyanliu. Online business people are able to shop for thousands of real items at the market, instead of going outside the village. They may log in descriptions and pictures of the commodities they are going to sell onto the Internet and go to the supermarket to pick up the products after having received clients' orders.

Business people from other areas of Zhejiang, and even from Chongqing Municipality in southwest China, Anhui in the eastern part of the country and Liaoning in the northeast, have flocked to Qingyanliu. Any of them may rent a house in the village and start an online business with a computer. All parts of the business process, from online shop registration to goods purchases and delivery, can be done inside the village.