In the current e-commerce environment, sellers are faced with a variety of logistics options, especially when shipping to a large market like Russia. For sellers operating on the OZON platform, it is crucial to understand and optimize the options for air and land transportation. This involves not only the consideration of logistics timeliness and cost, but also the strategy of how to efficiently manage the logistics process on the platform.
First, let’s take a look at the two main shipping methods: air and land transportation. Air transportation is favored by many sellers for its fast timeliness, although its cost is relatively high. At present, the air transportation logistics channels that OZON cooperates with can deliver packages to buyers within about 15 days, and even during holidays or special circumstances, the timeliness is only extended to about 20 days. Therefore, for products that pursue fast delivery and have higher profit margins, choosing air transportation is a wise decision.
Relatively speaking, land transportation provides more flexible transportation options, especially in terms of transportation restrictions. In terms of timeliness, land transportation takes about 20 to 40 days, and the freight is also more economical. This makes land transportation an ideal choice for sellers who are not so strict about timeliness or are sensitive to operating costs.
The OZON platform provides sellers with detailed logistics reference time and details of competing products. In the OZON backend, sellers can easily query the prohibited items, shipping conditions and shipping specifications of each channel. In addition, the platform also provides the contact information of the channel manager, so that sellers can directly consult the relevant details of logistics delivery to ensure the smooth progress of the entire logistics process.
During the delivery process, sellers need to pay special attention to some details to avoid affecting sales. First, once the SKU is successfully listed, the seller must change it to a saleable status, which requires adding inventory first. The platform requires sellers to set up warehouses in the store backend before adding inventory. In this process, sellers need to provide information about the shipping warehouse, including the address information of the return warehouse and the return recipient information.
Next, sellers need to set up effective and available logistics distribution methods for each warehouse. Sellers can choose to store and pack products by themselves and only cooperate with logistics companies for international transportation, or they can choose to cooperate with logistics companies from the beginning of warehousing and leave all the links of warehousing, packaging, labeling, and transportation to logistics companies.
OZON platform and logistics providers have also launched forward warehouse and border warehouse services, which are usually faster than ordinary delivery modes. Sellers can choose the most suitable mode according to their own needs. Currently, the platform stipulates that the logistics track of the package must be updated within 5 days at the latest. If the package fails to update the track in time within 5 days, its status will become a dispute, and the platform will give the seller a specified period to update the logistics track. If the seller fails to update within the specified period, the order may be automatically cancelled by the platform.
It should be noted that even if OZON gives the seller a deadline to update the logistics track, the order may still be determined by the platform as an overdue delivery order. Therefore, sellers should always pay attention to the logistics track of the order and update it in time.
Regarding the calculation of logistics costs, sellers can find OZON’s commission and rates on the OZON Seller Global page, and view the channel charging rules, cost details and time details of each logistics provider. The table will also show different delivery types, such as door-to-door delivery or point-to-point pickup.
The calculation method of logistics costs is relatively simple. Sellers can download a table of rates for various channels of logistics providers, and then find the corresponding logistics costs in the table based on the weight of the package and the selected transportation method. When choosing a logistics provider, sellers also need to compare freight rates, because sometimes land freight costs are even higher than air freight costs, and the wrong choice may lead to unnecessary cost waste.