HANGZHOU,
China — It’s the biggest shopping day of the year in China, and the
discounts are steep. But Jiang Shan waited to buy some of what she
wants.
On
Tuesday, tens of millions of Chinese like Ms. Jiang bought more than $9
billion worth of products online in honor of Singles’ Day, China’s de
facto e-commerce holiday and the world’s largest Internet shopping
event. But buying is one thing. Delivery is another.
Ms.
Jiang, who owns a bakery in the western Chinese city of Urumqi, spent
2,000 renminbi ($325) on a water purifier and kitchen supplies, and
would have spent even more, she said, if she were confident the products
she ordered would get to her quickly and undamaged.
“I
tend not to buy things on Singles’ Day because the logistics just worry
me too much,” she said. “If I get the stuff I ordered this year in 10
to 15 days, I’ll be happy.”
China
has caught the e-commerce bug. An underdeveloped retail sector and a
flourishing network of online merchants offering huge selections at
cheap prices has led the Chinese to look to the web first to buy
everything from shoes and ovens to toilet paper and toothbrushes.
The
Chinese e-commerce market is already bigger than that of the United
States, and by 2020 is projected to be the size of those of the United
States, Britain, Germany, Japan and France combined, according to a KPMG
report.
But
the country struggles with delivery, largely because of decades of
underinvestment in inland logistics infrastructure and inefficient local
regulation. Goods are slow to arrive in the interior of the country,
and damage is a persistent problem, affecting both consumers and small
businesses.
“Imagine
having 30 N.B.A. teams but only a few high school gyms to play in —
that was China’s logistics infrastructure when e-commerce took off,”
said Shen Haoyu, chief executive of the Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com’s business-to-consumer website.
Deliveries within China are so inefficient that the country spent 18 percent of its gross domestic product
on logistics in 2013, 6.5 percent above the global average and 9.5
percent above developed countries like the United States, said Fox Chu,
director of Asia Pacific infrastructure and transportation at the
consulting firm Accenture.
“Shipping
goods from Fujian to Beijing can be more expensive than shipping
something from Beijing to California,” he said, referring to the roughly
1,200 mile trip between the southern Chinese province and the country’s
capital.
Recently, both Alibaba, China’s main e-commerce company, and JD.com, its smaller rival, have tried to make things more efficient, especially inland.
Alibaba
has pledged to invest 100 billion renminbi ($16.3 billion) in an
initiative to link up third-party companies that deliver its shipments.
The idea is to form an alliance that uses Alibaba’s consumer and
shipment data to better anticipate orders and make delivery more
efficient.
JD.com,
on the other hand, is building its own warehouses and shipping its own
goods. Currently, the company can manage same-day deliveries in 100
cities and next-day deliveries in 600 others, said Mr. Shen, the JD.com
executive.
As
with most things in China, the state of logistics can be broken down by
geography and wealth. In the largest and most affluent cities on the
country’s eastern coast, just about anything can be delivered within a
day.
Zhang
Rui, an information technology salesman who lives in Beijing, no longer
buys even small daily necessities at stores. “Just about anything I
need at home I buy online, whether it’s groceries, toilet paper, rice,
cooking oil, salt, a toothbrush or shampoo,” he said.
For
Ms. Jiang, living inland, it’s another story. She recalled when a
courier refused to help her carry a heavy parcel up the stairs to her
apartment. Some couriers would not wait for her to open the package to
ensure the goods she ordered are all there and undamaged. Her friends
who live on the east coast and use Alibaba question how she survives out
west.
“When
the package comes, I don’t expect it to be pretty,” she said. “Even if
there’s a few scratches on something I don’t care anymore.”
Safety
has also become an issue. In late 2013 one person was killed and seven
hospitalized after a toxic liquid sent by a chemical company leaked onto
other parcels being delivered.
In 2012, a China Southern Airlines plane caught fire when weatherproof matches left inside a parcel ignited.
China’s
delivery problems are highlighted on Singles’ Day, which was originally
conceived as a way for the unmarried of China to shop away their
loneliness. Beginning Tuesday night, items from the 278.5 million orders
placed on Singles’ Day at Alibaba’s e-commerce sites will be shipped,
largely by truck, across a land mass the size of the United States and
crisscrossed by dizzying mountain ranges.
The
trucks will shuttle the packages from warehouses to smaller
distribution centers, paying costly tolls and running into traffic jams
along the way. After dropping off the goods, many vehicles cannot bring
packages back because of convoluted local regulations.
From
the distribution centers, equipped only with shelving to hold the
deluge of packages, hundreds of thousands of deliverymen will begin the
slow process of bringing each parcel to recipients spread out across
distant Himalayan hamlets, eastern Chinese megacities and jungle towns
on the South China Sea.
Part
of Alibaba’s plan to improve things is to establish warehouses at
critical points to help streamline deliveries. “China is too big, so we
cannot buy a lot of land for warehouses,” said Alibaba’s chief operating
officer, Daniel Zhang. “Instead, we will choose key areas, very
strategic locations where resources are quite limited.”
The company will share the new warehouse space with logistics partners like YTO Express, a private delivery company.
As
an early partner of Alibaba, YTO grew huge by delivering the millions,
and then billions, of goods ordered on the company’s e-commerce sites.
Last year, just 13 years after it was founded, YTO’s 130,000 employees
filled 1.5 billion orders across China.
For the increase in Singles’ Day orders, YTO hired 30,000 temporary workers. It plans to buy its first airplane next year.
This year for the first time, Alibaba is hoping to track the location of every item ordered during Singles’ Day.
JD.com’s
538,000-square-foot warehouse in southern Beijing, the largest in the
city, shows the advantages it gets by building its own delivery service.
The huge structure is ergonomically organized, and employees run full
speed, pushing carts loaded with goods in lanes segmented for those
going at different speeds. A screen displays how many orders each
employee has processed.
It
is a far cry from most warehouses in China, which are often open-air
and exposed to the elements, seemingly organized to cause traffic jams.
To
help reduce the backlog during Singles’ Day, JD.com ran promotions last
week and added temporary workers from around the country for extra
help. The warehouse can process more than 200,000 orders a day.
Though
it has proved costly to build what is effectively its own FedEx, the
strategy enables JD.com to process orders more quickly than its rivals,
even as its scale lags.
Most critically, it is able to train the couriers that Mr. Shen calls “literally the face of JD.com.”
Zhu
Sichang, 29, is one of those couriers. Mr. Zhu said his favorite time
on his job came after he dashed up several flights of stairs to get an
urgent delivery to a customer quickly.
“He saw I was pouring sweat and offered me a cup of water to thank me for my hard work,” he said.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar