AliExpress said that the oversized express line will be expanded to more countries and regions in the future.
According to surging news reports, on February 1, AliExpress and Cainiao announced that they will continue to increase the size of the Korean market and launch a "super oversized" express line, and large furniture and home appliances can be delivered to Korean consumers as soon as 7 days. This is also a new initiative for AliExpress to deepen the Korean market after the launch of the "five-day delivery" service in South Korea last year. AliExpress said that the oversized express line will be expanded to more countries and regions in the future.
In fact, in June last year, it was reported that South Korea, which ranks "the fifth largest e-commerce market in the world", is blowing a "AliExpress whirlwind". At that time, due to the surge in orders, AliExpress directly paralyzed the South Korean customs warehouse for a month - this is also the longest local warehouse explosion in recent years. According to Forbes Korea, AliExpress has more user time than local South Korean giant Coupang. Among the 2.5 million cross-users with South Korean e-commerce giant Coupang, AliExpress spends 2 hours per person69 hours, compared to 2 for coupang3 hours, much lower than the former.
Prior to this, AliExpress and Cainiao announced that they would launch the "Global Five-Day Delivery" express line products within the year, among them, South Korea was the first pilot place, after marking the five-day delivery, the order volume in the South Korean market increased by more than 100% year-on-year in May alone.
In recent years, the competition in the cross-border e-commerce industry has been fierce, with more traditional e-commerce companies including Shein, Temu, Lazada, and Amazon relying on shelf e-commerce to expand, and emerging e-commerce in the form of live broadcast e-commerce led by TikTok has continued to encroach on the market.
It is reported that among several large-scale cross-border platforms, Shein is planning to go public, Temu's parent company Pinduoduo once surpassed Alibaba in market value and became the top spot of Chinese e-commerce companies, and TikTok is booming overseas with emerging concepts such as interest e-commerce, content e-commerce, and live broadcast e-commerce.
In this situation, in January this year, AliExpress officially announced the full launch of semi-managed services.
It is reported that the semi-managed service is a new type of service model, mainly for self-operated businesses on the platform, and this service model is more flexible than the fully managed service. In the fully managed mode, the merchant does not directly connect with consumers, but is only responsible for production and stocking, and the platform leads all subsequent business activities. In the semi-managed model, the merchant is responsible for operation in addition to production and stocking, while the platform is mainly responsible for logistics fulfillment and return services.
The launch of the semi-managed service is an important upgrade of AliExpress's cross-border logistics services under the POP (merchant self-operation) model, aiming to help sellers quickly make up for the shortcomings in logistics services.
The biggest difference between the full custody and semi-custody models is that the platform is not the same degree of service to merchants and the main groups are different, in addition, the advantage of semi-custody is the improvement of logistics timeliness, which is good for brand merchants and overseas warehouse stocking merchants.
It's worth mentioning that there are also differences between semi-managed models. In AliExpress's semi-managed model, the platform is solely responsible for warehousing and fulfillment and delivery services, and sellers maintain autonomy over product pricing and operation; Temu's semi-custodial model requires merchants to manage overseas warehouse products and fulfill shipments by themselves, and the pricing power is still in the hands of the platform. These two models reflect the characteristics and capabilities of their respective platforms and are designed to enable more efficient fulfillment services at a lower cost.