"Half of the money earned throughout the year is given to logistics service providers." This is a phrase that was widely circulated in the cross-border e-commerce seller circle last year, and it is also a true portrayal of the cross-border industry last year.
In fact, cross-border e-commerce, which has been in full swing since the beginning of the epidemic, has not had a good time since the second half of last year, while in contrast, the price of shipping has reached a record high. Although there has been a decline in 2022, it is still at a high level compared to before the epidemic.
The myth of making a fortune by selling containers to make a house has filled the entire industry.
The soaring price of maritime transport has prompted cross-border logistics to usher in an industry dividend period. The direct beneficiaries of the upstream meat, downstream soup, and the sea freight boom are cross-border logistics service providers. A 10-year-old freight forwarder also confirmed this view: "The company's best-performing employees have a monthly income of more than 100,000 yuan. According to the data of Tianyancha, the number of companies in the new forwarding industry exceeded 9,500 last year, and the number of companies established in the previous three years was only 15,000.
The root cause of the freight forwarder's ability to lie in the profit is still the opacity of the industry. The link from the shipping company to the seller may even pass through layers 3 to 4 of freight forwarder distribution, and every other layer means that there is a layer of opaque information and space for adding weight. Relying on the replacement of left and right hand resources, many intermediaries take advantage of poor information and opaque prices to make a lot of money in it.
And such a story has long existed in the cross-border logistics industry, "abnormality is a norm." "It's just that the epidemic has amplified this chaos and made the industry begin to realize that the transformation is imminent."
Regarding the transformation of the cross-border logistics industry, one of the most recognized future developments is digitalization. This conjecture has also been sought after by capital, and since last year, hot money has poured into digitalization.
Among them, cross-border good luck has completed hundreds of millions of yuan of Series A financing. In March this year, 8 new cities such as Chengdu, Changsha, Xiamen and Zhengzhou were newly opened, extending the service scope from the coast to the new first-tier/second-tier key cities in the inland, becoming a national Internet cross-border logistics platform.
As a corner of the Internet that has never penetrated, the digitalization of the cross-border logistics industry is on the agenda today.
The imminent digitization
As a product of cross-border trade, freight forwarders are undoubtedly an important player. The problem solved by the early freight forwarder was the information difference between the shipping company and the cargo owner, that is, to help the two sides match the resources, and then extended to the business links such as customs declaration, foreign exchange settlement, issuance of bills of lading, and settlement of transportation and miscellaneous expenses.
Freight forwarders play an indispensable role in the maritime chain, which accounts for about 90% of global trade. After all, the cargo owner's package is on the journey across the ocean, and it is possible to encounter stranding, water ingress, machine failure, abnormal weather, pirates and so on. The direct bearer of these losses is the freight forwarder.
However, such a risky industry is not only extremely fragmented, but also always in a state of opacity. According to the 2019 volume calculation, the market share of the top 6 in the global market is only 8.8%, of which the german Dexun, which ranks first, has been established for 131 years, but the market share is only 2.9%.
The root cause of the low market share and the internet's inability to penetrate it lies in the complexity and lengthiness of the maritime chain on the one hand. The seller's goods from the factory to the ship need to go through seven major links: collection, warehouse, customs, dry, customs, transfer and distribution. Therefore, the services involved in different links are also different, and the standards, rules and regulations are difficult to unify.
"No matter how this market develops, it has exceeded the boundaries of a modern company, and it is difficult to form a monopoly market with only 1-2 unicorns." It is extremely fragmented, involves countries, and is at the same time a network of strong collaboration. Cross-border good luck COO Starry Sky said.
On the other hand, the freight forwarding industry is still essentially a resource network. If you want to make more money in the freight forwarding industry, it is often resources and connections that are competing. A number of freight forwarding practitioners admitted to 36Kr that maintaining customers and valuing human feelings are the core of freight forwarding work, "Sometimes accompanying customers to drink a few more glasses of wine may be able to drink the price of the box." ”
At the same time, due to opacity and long chains, black box operations often occur during shipping. After all, the goods can not perceive whether the ship being sent matches the price paid, and therefore, the transportation process is always an unknown for the seller, which has led to frequent chaos such as "true and false Meisen" last year. In addition, in the subsequent delayed compensation and other links, because the seller's bargaining power for the freight forwarder is not high, it also leads to non-standard and non-standard industry services.
Opaque prices and chains, non-standard performance and services, magnified by the exponential increase in maritime prices, have not only made players in the industry aware of the importance of digitalization. It also indicates that the traditional freight forwarding service method is no longer suitable for the future market.
Traditional industries infiltrated by the Internet
So, what kind of digitalization can better cater to future market developments?
In recent years, with the continuous enthusiasm of the topic of digitalization, a logistics resource integration service platform to enhance the level of digitalization in the industry has begun to rise in the cross-border industry. Cross-border good luck is a typical representative of this, and the emergence of such platform freight forwarders has also accelerated the cross-border logistics industry to a new inflection point.
To put it simply, what cross-border good luck is doing can be analogous to a B-end Ctrip. Through the logistics service provider resources stationed on the platform, sellers can obtain mature transportation solutions for the global cross-border e-commerce market on the platform, including all transaction links such as inquiry and order placement, which can also be completed online.
In fact, the core role that digitalization can play in the logistics industry at this stage is to solve the problem of transparency and standardization.
From the perspective of cross-border good luck services, transparency is first reflected in the transparency of prices, that is, the use of digitalization to solve the problem of poor information. So how can the platform achieve price transparency? This is related to the positioning of the platform. As a connector between the service provider and the seller, the platform can understand the seller's demands and obtain the needs of the supplier, and therefore is in a fair position of a third party, which also makes the platform have the ability to combine the considerations of both parties. In such a position, the pricing of the platform is also more fair to the industry.
On the other hand, the platform also puts forward requirements for the service providers that settle in. "Service providers entering our platform need a standardized settlement process, after multiple screening and qualification evaluation, of which 80% are logistics special line enterprises in the industry." Usually, most of the prices that disrupt the market are freight forwarding intermediaries, so the prices proposed by the private line companies are more real. For service providers, the settled platform can rely on better service and performance, etc., and does not necessarily need to leverage customers with the reserve price. Starry sky indicates.
Similarly, the platform's ability to gather resources also promotes the platform to have the attribute of credibility. However, in the end, it is still the shipment volume that determines the right to speak on the platform. According to publicly disclosed data, cross-border good luck will reach 1.012 billion yuan in 2021, with a month-on-month growth rate of 55.6%. More than 60,000 users have placed orders, and more than 1,000 cross-border logistics service providers have been integrated into the platform and provided online services.
The second is the transparency of the maritime chain, which also avoids the previous black box operation. Open the official website of the platform, as long as you enter the order number, you can find out which section of transportation the goods are in. According to the maritime chain, most platforms will be divided into nodes according to various links such as ordering, picking up, measuring, and customs. And set a clear timeliness standard at each node, and the data is transmitted back to the platform in real time, if the dwell time at any node exceeds the timeliness standard, the platform will actively issue an early warning to the cargo owner.
The third is the evaluation mechanism of service providers. On the platform, by establishing a sound service provider operation and management mechanism, a evaluation system similar to the public review is created, which allows users to judge the credibility of the service provider. Each cooperation between users and service providers can make data precipitate on the platform, and also provide reference for sellers to identify the performance history and the advantages and disadvantages of routes.
In terms of standardization, the role of the platform is mainly reflected in the performance of contracts and customer service after the fact. In the past logistics industry, performance was usually a non-standard thing, such as where the goods arrived, whether there was a problem with the measurement data, etc., all of which relied on asking the freight forwarder to judge. As a result, it is difficult to achieve industry unification at the level of information and standardization.
In the service link after the fact, such as delayed payment, some freight forwarders lose 5 cents a kilogram, some 8 cents, the industry does not have a unified standard at the same time, there are differences in customer cognition. Multiple appeals have jointly spawned an opportunity for the platform to formulate standards, and the standards formulated by the platform have also provided a basis for adjudication for follow-up services.
This includes: in the collection link by the platform free collection, the measurement link in accordance with the platform unified standards to measure pricing, etc.; in terms of after-sales protection, cross-border good luck has also introduced standardized rules such as "false one loss according to three times the freight" and "delayed daily compensation".
The point at which the layout is accelerated has arrived
Shipping is a cyclical event, which also means that freight rates at historically high levels are difficult to sustain at this peak.
At the same time, after experiencing multiple black swan epidemics such as platform supervision and Amazon store closures, cross-border e-commerce has also reached a moment when it needs to stop and think this year. Many people in the industry even predict that this year may be a year of cold cross-border e-commerce.
Therefore, for downstream logistics service providers, this year is not a promising year. However, the calmness of the market does not mean stopping, in the eyes of the starry sky, but this year, it is a good time for the platform to accelerate the layout. "At the node of tight capacity, we can provide better services and regulate the chaos of the original market, which is precisely the opportunity to educate the market more easily."
Therefore, from March, Cross-border Good Luck will increase the localization operation team of Chengdu, Changsha, Xiamen, Zhengzhou, Wuhan, Hefei, Taiyuan and Xi'an to expand the scope of services to more inland cities.
This consideration lies in the fact that in the past, cross-border sellers in inland cities did not have many choices in cross-border logistics. Unlike coastal cities, there are not many freight forwarders in inland cities, and sellers often need to send goods to coastal cities. In these cities, the proportion of small and medium-sized sellers accounts for the majority.
With the rapid development of the cross-border e-commerce industry, these cities have also formed cross-border industrial clusters that combine their own advantages. Among them, in the first two months of 2022, the transaction scale of chengdu cross-border e-commerce reached 5.961 billion yuan, an increase of 115% year-on-year, which is 5 times the growth rate of the total import and export volume of foreign trade. Hefei, the capital of China's home appliances, has established a complete industrial chain system integrating home appliance research and development, production, sales, logistics and related supporting enterprise clusters, and exported home appliances to 14.27 billion yuan in the first three quarters of 2021, an increase of 9.3% over last year.
Under the strong support and subsidy policies of local governments for related industrial chains, the cross-border industries in these new first-tier/second-tier cities have huge prospects and growth space.
However, in the face of such an emerging market, it is the service capability itself that is more tested by the platform. In this regard, the confidence of cross-border good luck comes from:
On the one hand, the stable operation mode of the platform can be quickly applied to the newly opened cities in terms of standardization and supply chain control, and a seller service network and logistics service integration network can be pulled up. Especially under the influence of the epidemic since the beginning of this year, a large number of freight forwarders in Shenzhen have been sealed and managed, and there are still nearly 600 lines and programs sent from Shenzhen to the world on the platform of cross-border good luck.
On the other hand, the newly launched cross-border seller logistics management SaaS "Good Luck Steward". In the past logistics operation process of sellers, they often rely on offline processing, Excel entry forms and other forms, and the SaaS system is to transfer these inefficient processing links to online, improve the efficiency of sellers in logistics operations, and help sellers efficiently manage service providers and logistics orders.
In addition, the greater value of "Good Luck Butler" lies in providing data support for cross-border sellers' logistics decisions. In fact, most small and medium-sized sellers are not professional in their logistics business, and even the actual logistics cost of goods is not clear. The "Good Luck Steward" can make up for this and help sellers analyze logistics costs and logistics trends.
From this point of view, although the Internet penetration of the cross-border logistics industry is not high, in fact, there is still a lot of room for digital imagination. The improvement of efficiency and the standardized operation of the industry are calling for the advent of digitalization.
It is precisely under this market sentiment that the discussion of light assets or heavy assets in the cross-border logistics industry has always been a hot topic. Regardless of the future outcome, at least at this stage, what logistics service providers are doing is still solving the primary problem. "For us, light and heavy is just a formality, or a strategy. The key remains at what stage and what problems we need to solve. Starry Sky thought.