The main problem of my country’s cross-border e-commerce logistics is that a large number of cross-border e-commerce companies have greatly increased the requirements for cross-border logistics, but the current infrastructure and management level of my country’s logistics still lags behind those of developed countries, becoming a bottleneck restricting the rapid development of cross-border e-commerce. The main problems are as follows.
1. High cost
Since the small items sold by cross-border e-commerce are delivered by international express and international parcels, such as international e-mail, DHL FedEx, UPS, TNT, etc. Although the timeliness can be guaranteed, the freight remains high. If the seller increases the price of the goods accordingly, it will lose the price advantage when competing with foreign products.
2. Too slow timeliness
The speed of cross-border e-commerce logistics delivery is an important factor affecting the purchase of overseas buyers. Customers in Europe and the United States have higher requirements for timeliness. If the delivery time exceeds expectations, customers often return or complain. Taking China Post’s parcel as an example, it takes 5 to 10 days to deliver to neighboring Asian countries; 7 to 15 days to major European and American countries; and 15 to 30 days to other countries and regions. The Hong Kong Postal Parcel, which is most commonly used by sellers of small transactions, has repeatedly caused a serious backlog of goods due to excessive business volume, and many sellers are forced to find other more expensive logistics companies.
3. The overseas warehouses of large e-commerce companies are closed and rarely share resources with small and medium-sized e-commerce companies
As the categories of cross-border e-commerce gradually increase and upgrade, large and heavy goods represented by household products are increasing and difficult to deliver by air. Traditional sea transportation was used to be used. Due to the long delivery time, many e-commerce companies use overseas warehouses for delivery to shorten the time for goods to reach customers and attract more buyers. E-commerce platforms such as cBay, Amazon, and Newegg began to require or encourage Chinese sellers to use overseas warehouses more to ship goods to ensure user experience. At present, the number of overseas warehouses in mature markets such as North America and Europe in my country’s cross-border e-commerce is mostly large, such as Dalong.com FBDD and XRU (Russian Express) jointly built “overseas warehouses” in Russia. Guangzhou’s Export Easy also built its own storage centers in the UK, the US, Australia, Russia and Spain. However, the construction and operation costs of overseas warehouses are relatively high. They are mainly suitable for commodities with high prices, strong ability to bear logistics costs and large market sales. They are operated in a closed manner by sellers with strong financial strength, and the resource sharing degree with small-value products of small and medium-sized e-commerce enterprises is relatively low.
4. Weak supply chain high-end and value-added service capabilities
At present, China’s cross-border logistics is mainly concentrated in traditional logistics transportation, distribution, freight forwarding customs declaration, booking and other levels, while some high-end supply chain services such as the provision of integrated supply chain optimal solutions, cloud computing information platform, cross-border finance, overseas instant delivery and other service capabilities are insufficient. At the same time, the visualization and information transparency of logistics are relatively low. Although there are third-party international logistics warehousing and consolidation and B2C foreign trade platform warehousing and consolidation in China, they are mainly initiated and operated by giant e-commerce companies, such as Alibaba’s “AliExpress”, Dunhuang.com’s full value chain service platform, Shenzhen 4PX and other cross-border supply chain integrated service providers. The goods are first collected uniformly, and then sorted and distributed uniformly according to their destination, category, quantity, etc. For products with a large number and high frequency of cross-border e-commerce orders, the collection and delivery time can be shortened, and the distribution costs can be shared. This is the beginning of the development of e-commerce platform services towards the high end of the industrial chain. However, due to the large investment in warehousing and logistics in the early stage, the internal and external resource integration and coordination mechanism are not perfect, and the operation process is complicated, so its industry penetration and service integration are not high.