It was seven o’clock in the evening, good and dark. There should be nobody in the self-pickup station in Nanjing University. However, the light was all on and the staff were busy with their packages.
“Since November 11, our work is twice as much as before,” Ran Lee said. She works for Yunda Express Company. She told me that there used to be two members of staff in this station, but there are five working here these days. “We even have no time to eat our meals,” Lee complained to me.
Her new work these days is to keep order of the line waiting for their packages. A long queue is zigzagging just like a snake taking hold of its own tail and making itself into a loop. New arrivals can hardly find the right place to join the queue. Every day between 4 and 7 pm is the peak period for picking up parcels.
November 11, so called 11-11 Shopping Carnival, is a day similar to Black Friday in America. Since 2009, China’s main E-commerce outlets, such as Tmall, Jingdong and Suning have made big sales online during this perios, and others such as Valentine’s Day. In October 2014, Alibaba claimed that it has made 11 November a registered trademark. Last year, there were 467 million packages on Taobao.com, worth ¥122.94 billion, with a year-on-year growth of about 140 percent, according to a survey report from Forward-looking industry research institute.
The boom in orders becomes a major problem for the logistics industry. Jack Ma once said in a financial program that he had no worry about turnover but late delivery. This year, approximately 1.7 million couriers participated in the delivery end of the shopping carnival. This phenomenon contributed to the development of logistics infrastructure, in which 200,000 new couriers joined this industry last year. What’s more, more than 100 turnover centres were established. 12000 cars came into service. 40 special air lines were added. However, customers can hardly receive some of their goods on time.
“I have waited here for over thirty minutes,” Xiaoti Zhou showed me her short message for the pick-up. Her package is No. 3129. “I was shocked by the number,” she laughed. “But now, I am used to it. This is the fourth package I received during 11-11.” During this Shopping Carnival, she has bought six packages worth thousands of yuan. Besides make-up and skincare, there are also dresses, living goods and a wide variety of others. Some of them were reserved before 11-11, a method used to relieve the pressure of delivery.
Advanced sale is a good solution for reducing the logistics pressure. In order to make it more convenient for customers to pick up their packages at any time, Taobao.com has its own pickup agency for their customers. Taobao also makes good use of big data for storage and distribution. Suning has long had its own physical stores, thus pick-up becomes a key advantage. As for Jingdong, they try to make the promotion period longer, besides close cooperation among sellers, logistics and delivery.
Long delivery times are the main complaint of customer. Some 25 percent of telephone complaints to the State Postal Bureau are in regard to delivery delays. The expansion of e-business dare not ignore the importance of logistics.
