New trends in the development of e-commerce downstream

After a year of ups and downs in 2018, cross-border e-commerce in 2019 does not seem to be improving. Unsurprisingly, the cross-border e-commerce industry has been panning in the waves, shuffling multiple cards, and well-doing sellers have continued to grow, and many small sellers have fallen. Today's cross-border e-commerce industry has reached the stage of refined management. The days of extensive management and lying down to make money have long been memories and are gone forever. Every capable or newly established seller has built a relatively mature management process internally, and will also be equipped with a suitable ERP to support the company's development and meet business, supply chain, and financial control. There are very few companies that manage pure excel forms. After the seller has carefully calculated each internal account, the cost control requires more upstream to give a longer payment settlement period and downstream to provide more affordable logistics costs. So how to make adjustments to meet the changing needs of the market in order to protect the downstream formats of the sellers? Current cross-border logistics situation in China: Hundreds of people compete for the flow, the men and women are competing for the deer-the competition of the Quartet! Force 1: Post Postal is the most widely used mode of transport for cross-border sellers. According to statistics, 70% of China's cross-border e-commerce B2C business is completed by post, and China Post has a 50% market share. Good foreign post now: Belgium Post, Singapore Post, Netherlands Post, Deutsche Post, etc. Based on the cooperation of the Universal Postal Union, the extensive delivery coverage of the postal channels makes it difficult for other forces to look beyond their reach. At the same time, the advantage of the postal service is that it does not charge surcharges in remote areas. There are two types of postal services: One is a postal parcel, which weighs less than 2kg. Suitable for shipments with low value and low timeliness. The other category is EMS, Speedpost, which is a more advanced service, with faster timeliness and higher prices. For some specific items, you cannot use commercial express, and you want effective guarantee, then EMS is a good choice. Force 2: Commercial Express Since TNT was acquired by Fedex, International Express F4 has become a battle between the three international express giants. Commercial courier provides door-to-door service, and the timeliness is the fastest, and the price is relatively high. Therefore, for high-value products, or products that require urgent delivery, commercial express is preferred. Since commercial express delivery is a private enterprise, when it comes to customs clearance between countries, it cannot be compared with postal services with government backgrounds. The natural customs clearance model makes commercial express delivery strict requirements on special items, such as charged and powder items. Force 3: Special Line Logistics Dedicated logistics is a group of logistics service providers born out of cross-border development. Dedicated line logistics adopts the form of air reservation, which transports goods directly from country to country, and the final process is handed over to local logistics service providers to complete the distribution. As a result of cooperation with local logistics service providers, some dedicated lines will launch a 'double-clearance tax package' service. In today's European vat crackdown, I am not sure whether this service is still reliable. Force 4: Overseas warehouse layout With the vigorous development of cross-border business, buyers are discerning, and the platform requires delivery timeliness. Many sellers, especially boutique sellers, have started shipping overseas warehouses early. Virtual warehouses, which were all the rage at the time, also gradually shifted to the right path of overseas warehouses for various reasons. Compared to earlier sellers, cross-border sellers are now happier. There are so many logistics service providers to choose from, and they can provide door-to-door service. However, because cross-border logistics involves complicated procedures such as customs clearance and tax refunds, additional miscellaneous fees need to be paid, including operating costs, booking fees, and shipping charges. In fact, cross-border e-commerce logistics is still a deep water, and sellers still need to spend a lot of energy to take care of it, choose a logistics channel vendor that suits them, and find the balance between cargo safety and logistics costs. So where will the future cross-border e-commerce logistics go? Future outlook 1. Capital blessing to accelerate the reshuffle integration. ??????On June 29, 2019, Zongteng announced the B + round of financing, which was only 4 months after the last round of B round financing. The lead investors were Minfu Fund and Yiwu Mall Financial Control. Zongteng's barn has a clear first-mover advantage in overseas US warehouses, and previously acquired Yuntu Logistics, which is the most successful one for sellers to transform into comprehensive service providers. New trends in the development of e-commerce downstream On July 1, 2019, Buyandship, a Hong Kong cross-border e-commerce shipping service company, completed a $ 2.2 million pre-B round of financing. It mainly provides one-stop transshipment services, with self-operated warehouses in the United States and Japan, and flights back to Hong Kong every week. 2019.6 Where to Ship? Get a Series C financing led by Sequoia China, setting a record for single financing amount in China's shipping technology sector. Sequoia's action also proves that the investment community is optimistic about the prospects of cross-border markets. At the same time, the addition of capital can more quickly reshuffle the industry. 2. Differentiated value-added services. Cross-border logistics is a very long service chain. Basic services include one-stop services such as cargo collection, loading and unloading, transportation, online tracking of orders, customs clearance, and local delivery. Today, for cross-border e-commerce sellers, there are two headaches: 1) There is no cross-border logistics channel that can fully meet the needs of sellers. Therefore, sellers have to dock with multiple cross-border logistics providers. 2) As a hard cost, logistics is nothing more than the cost, but it can not give valuable feedback. Regarding the first problem, I believe that the injection of capital can accelerate the expansion of the capacity range of head logistics service providers and the emergence of logistics resource integration service providers. Solving the first problem will happen sooner or later. As for the second question, it is actually a question that every logistics service provider, even a small logistics service provider, should think about. Does the competition in the logistics market just fight for prices? Can you provide other differentiated services? For example: according to its own data, feedback to VIP customers, which packaging material is the least likely to be damaged, or which packaging specifications are used, which can maximize logistics savings. 3. Automation, digitization and information. 【automation】 The current cross-border e-commerce logistics providers, especially freight forwarders, are still more labor-intensive enterprises. Picking up items at your door, sorting them in warehouse, loading them to the airport or dock, all are manual operations. Now the technology supports the cross-border logistics industry more through software + basic hardware mode, such as PDA, load-bearing scanning integrated machine, sorting conveyor belt and other hardware to improve human efficiency. Next, the popularity of new technologies such as drones, unmanned cars, and intelligent robots is believed to soon help the downstream development of cross-border e-commerce. Realizing science and technology to serve the society will be a qualitative leap in improving the efficiency of the entire cross-border supply chain. With the support of logistics technology, cross-border e-commerce logistics can be aligned with domestic ones. For example, JD Logistics has more mature technical solutions in intelligent storage and unmanned vehicle distribution. At the end of June, LCD, a cross-border e-commerce logistics cooperation and development organization, went to Jingdong No. 1 warehouse to visit and learn. With the rising salaries of employees today, the need to use technology to increase business workload is increasingly evident downstream of cross-border e-commerce. 【Digitizing】 Due to the relatively slow development of the global international shipping capacity infrastructure, the supply of global air and sea transportation capacity cannot meet the current rapid growth of cross-border e-commerce demand. In recent years, the cross-border e-commerce international logistics dedicated line market has almost no difference in peak seasons. The service has been highly saturated throughout the year, so international freight rates have also shown a steady upward trend. Cross-border e-commerce exports are concentrated in coastal cities such as Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Yiwu, Hangzhou, and Ningbo, so there is an imbalance in the capacity of international logistics lines. It is understood that relying on the industrial foundation and the location advantage of being close to the Hong Kong Airport, Shenzhen alone accounts for nearly 60% of the country's cross-border e-commerce export packages, and a large number of international logistics dedicated line resources are also concentrated here. So how to allocate a reasonable dispatch of transportation resources? How to arrange the time and frequency of door-to-door delivery? How to effectively allocate routes during peak season? All of these require data precipitation. Through analysis, an effective digital model is built to enhance the transportation resources of the entire cross-border e-commerce and ensure that the seller's products can be delivered in a timely manner. 【Informatization】 Its platform provides real-time tracking of goods, structured data analysis, online communication, and support from logistics experts, making supply chain management simpler, more reliable, and more accurate. For many years, the freight forwarding industry has relied heavily on manual operations. A single freight order requires multiple roles to repeatedly enter and transfer data on the chain, and the information is transmitted in a single chain, which results in high cost of information flow, low efficiency and error. Through the new SAAS online system, FLEXPORT changed the single chain and unidirectionality of information transmission by technical means, and realized the visualization of the whole chain. FLEXPORT online system main advantages: Online (full online, multi-party collaboration) visualization (dynamic update, real-time presentation) automation (automatic quote, automatic operation) report management modular design, independent report management At present, the degree of cross-border logistics informatization in China is relatively lagging. There are already many cross-border e-commerce information service platforms. I believe that in the near future, a number of cross-border logistics information service platforms will be born, and there will be one or two Only unicorns appeared.