hich has achieved wide coverage across the country, is not only playing a role in making the daily life more convenient for residents, but also in boosting business for small-scale supermarkets, while big-scale ones are seizing an increasing amount of the lion's share thanks to association or alliance with such platforms.

In Linquan County, Fuyang City of east China's Anhui Province, 38-year-old Liu Yanhong has been working in her family-run grocery store for almost half her life.

However, with growing numbers of large supermarkets winning over customers with larger scale, wider options and lower prices, the situation has become tough for small-scale shops, whose only advantage may be the geographical location.

Seizing tight of this straw, many supermarkets have formed association or alliance with online takeaway platforms, where customers could make their orders with perhaps lower delivery fee and within shorter timing.

"At first, we were not really familiar with the system, and only got a few orders," Liu said.

To help the small-scale shops get on track as soon as possible, artificial intelligence has been introduced. In the platform companies, screens could show the simultaneous retail situation all throughout the day, enabling 10,000 orders within a single second, significantly boosting efficiency.

Nowadays, Liu's grocery store is packed with over 3,000 kinds of products while the sales volume has doubled several times.

As the three family members could no longer cope with the surging demand, they've hired several stockers.

"I can earn about 3,000 to 5,000 yuan (437 to 728 U.S. dollars) per month, which is a pretty nice income, and I've got to have a stable job," said one stocker.

Liu's grocery store is only an epitome of the bigger picture. The street where her shop sits used to settle into silence as the sun goes down, but these days, strings of lights would light up late into the night, with customers fully enjoying the evening hours.

Song Wei, director of the Development and Reform Commission of Linquan County, said undermining the thriving business is the county's focus on internet development over recent years.

The internet lines now run more than 2,100 kilometers in Linquan, almost doubling the mileage a decade ago. About 2,293 4G base stations have secured internet access for each and every household in the county, while 2,123 5G base stations have been further speeding up connection in downtown areas.

"Improvement of transportation infrastructure and full-scale coverage of wireless networks are greatly boosting development of the new business format and the economy. This is especially true for market entities, whose number has kept growing annually by about more than 10,000 here," said Song.

In the first two months of the year, China's online sales volume topped two trillion yuan (about 298.69 billion U.S. dollars), up 6.2 percent compared with the same period of last year.