Cross-border e-commerce trade has grown more than 10 times

What is an overseas warehouse?

Overseas warehouses are digital and intelligent storage facilities built or rented overseas, which help to open up the “last mile” of cross-border trade.

Industry insiders did the math for the reporter: in ordinary cross-border logistics, after overseas buyers place an order, domestic sellers need to deliver through international logistics, which involves customs declaration, customs clearance and other procedures, and generally takes at least 5 to 10 days. Items shipped directly from overseas warehouses are generally received by customers in 1 to 3 days.

If your impression of this “warehouse” is still that the goods are “residences” overseas, then the role played by overseas warehouses now will surprise you.

Let the ordering, delivery, transportation, and distribution of goods be visualized throughout the process, provide consumer portraits, and customized data analysis reports… Overseas warehouses based on digital management integrate logistics, warehousing, finance, distribution and other resources, helping cross-border e-commerce to form a new business model in terms of technology, model, supply chain, etc.

“It not only improves transportation timeliness, but also guarantees user experience.” Ye Hanmei, sales director of Shenzhen Baosen Santong Logistics Co., Ltd., said that since 2020, the company has established three overseas warehouses in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom.

As an important new infrastructure serving cross-border e-commerce, overseas warehouses directly shorten the distance between Chinese sellers and foreign customers, simplify customs clearance procedures, speed up trade turnover, and are conducive to solving the pain points of after-sales services such as refunds and returns, and effectively enhance the global competitiveness of Chinese manufacturing.

In the era of globalization, Internet +, and big data, new forms of foreign trade development are becoming more and more diverse. How to speed up the construction of overseas warehouses?

It should be noted that overseas warehouses are not as simple as renting a warehouse overseas. Service providers need to have sufficient financial strength and operating experience, as well as the ability to deal with uncertain risks such as local political, cultural, and regulatory differences.

The opinions issued recently have put forward 15 specific measures such as “strengthening industry organization construction and talent training”, “unblocking cross-border e-commerce enterprise financing channels”, and “improving cross-border data management and service levels”.

In order to promote the experience of overseas warehouse construction, the Ministry of Commerce has issued a number of practical cases: some overseas warehouses have carried out intelligent management and control of millions of commodities, with a data accuracy rate of 99%; some overseas warehouses have formulated exclusive marketing strategies based on local market characteristics; some overseas warehouses have built overseas legal, financial, and tax teams to help customers avoid violations such as intellectual property infringement and avoid various tax risks…

Looking to the future, how broad is the development space for overseas warehouses?

From the policy perspective, both the national and local governments have stepped up efforts to support the construction of overseas warehouses, and used this as a starting point to tap new momentum for foreign trade.

From the demand side, the global e-commerce market is growing rapidly, the cross-border e-commerce industry is in the ascendant, and there is considerable room for overseas warehouses to grow upward.

Pinduoduo’s cross-border e-commerce platform Temu recently launched a Brazilian site, which is the 70th national site opened by Temu, taking an important step in the layout of the South American market.

AliExpress, a cross-border platform operated by Alibaba Group, will have approximately 8.58 million members in South Korea in April 2024, doubling from April 2023.

According to the latest research report of Australian market research company Roy Morgan, more than 2 million Australians shop on Chinese cross-border e-commerce platforms SHEIN and Temu online platforms every month. According to exclusive data from Handelsblatt, a German newspaper, 1/4 of Germans have shopped on Chinese e-commerce platforms.

With the advantages of reducing trade intermediate links, breaking time and space restrictions, and improving logistics technology and systems, cross-border e-commerce has become a new engine for the development of my country’s foreign trade.

In the first quarter of this year, the import and export of cross-border e-commerce in China was 577.6 billion yuan, an increase of 9.6%, of which exports were 448 billion yuan, an increase of 14%, accounting for 7.8% of exports, driving export growth by more than 1 percentage point.

To make global shopping more convenient, with the further implementation of various support policies, the construction of overseas warehouses will promote the development of cross-border e-commerce, more Chinese brands will go global, and more global goods will enter China.