In the cross-border market, the platform is the dealer and the customs is the judge. Since logistics companies value business volume, small and medium-sized enterprise shippers often lack control over large logistics companies due to insufficient cargo volume, and thus cannot get good product prices and services. Cooperation with e-commerce platforms is an irresistible thing for all cross-border logistics companies. Among them, the four major cross-border platforms (Amazon, eBay, Wish, and AliExpress) account for 80% of export packages. Logistics companies are generally very cautious about “standing in line” with e-commerce platforms, but upstream platforms have a large amount of data and orders, and peripheral service providers do not actually have much say. The “platform hegemony” of e-commerce platforms over logistics is essentially derived from traffic. Logistics companies are afraid of losing the opportunity to face consumers directly and weakening their ability to freely control the network. E-commerce logistics is a low-price scale market, and it is difficult to obtain monopoly excess profits. Therefore, even if faced with the situation of “bullying customers with big stores”, they are powerless to refuse. E-commerce platforms adhere to the concept of user experience first, collect all logistics time limit data, and then analyze user complaints to know which logistics routes and carriers are not good.
E-commerce platforms in the Internet era have led business organizations to develop in the direction of platformization. Platforms are organizers and should not become dealers who profit from them. The trend of upstream and downstream integration of the entire e-commerce + logistics industry is becoming more and more obvious. Amazon has established its own air cargo and shipping agency platform, Cainiao International has opened regular cross-border e-commerce cargo charter flights and made a series of large investments in logistics infrastructure abroad, and JD Logistics has also opened up to the outside world for sharing. More cross-border e-commerce platforms have integrated logistics services. Although sellers can still choose different logistics channels to ship offline and bypass the platform, mainstream platforms use recommended logistics products to confirm order delivery, and even force warehousing and use platform traffic as an exchange condition, which makes sellers feel very embarrassed. The branding of merchants and products is also raising the requirements for the quality of logistics channels, striving to avoid ballast and explosion throughout the year. Another type of platform logistics company has a shared economy model such as socialized logistics, vehicle-cargo matching, capacity trading, and freight Didi. It seems that the industry threshold is low, but in fact it is very complicated. If there is no accumulation, it is impossible to establish a complete ecosystem.