Logistics Treasure Has Little Control Over Partners.

Event background

In June 11th, TaoBao Officially announced its big logistics plan, the core of the plan includes the API interface fully open Taobao logistics platform (http://e56.taobao.com), logistics partner system and logistics service standard system and so on three big contents. This is another major step in Taobao's logistics sector after the official stock market crash in March 29th of this year.

It is understood that the first online logistics platform of Taobao refers to the internal and external networks of Taobao. Warehousing, express delivery, software And other logistics enterprises form a service alliance, providing one-stop e-business logistics outsourcing service to solve the logistics information platform of goods distribution (gathering, processing, distributing, picking, distributing, packing) and delivering difficult problems.

In addition to Taobao, in the field of e-commerce, B2C giants such as Jingdong mall and van keepin are also involved in the logistics sector. Among them, Jingdong mall will get 50% of its over $150 million financing for warehousing, distribution and other services.

For Taobao, Jingdong mall and other reasons why the same thing involves logistics, this is briefly analyzed below.

Billion state analysis

1, Taobao's involvement in logistics is intended to improve the whole online shopping industry chain.

The reason why Taobao has been involved in logistics is that the domestic logistics industry is not mature enough to meet the various needs of e-commerce. This field can better improve the whole e-commerce ecosystem chain and provide better user experience for online shopping users.

Classical Competition analysis theory It is believed that when an industry is not mature, that is, when the chain is not clear, it is the most efficient way for a company to integrate these chains. At this time, the best strategy for the leading enterprises in the industry is to do everything on the industrial chain.

At present, the entire online retail industry is in a period of rapid development. Many links in the entire industrial chain are not mature enough. Under such circumstances, the practice of Taobao and Jingdong mall as the leading enterprises in the industry is improving the industrial chain step by step and step by step.

Taobao has the most obvious action in this respect. The payment environment is not perfect, so in 2004 the establishment of Alipay, in the upstream flow acquisition problems, so in November 2007, founded the online advertising platform Ali mother, 09 years in September and Zhejiang daily newspaper group to establish a Fashion Life Weekly "Taobao world", in December 9th 09 and Hunan satellite TV cooperation to launch happy Taobao; and in the downstream sales channel, in January this year officially announced the next line of retail sales, open Taobao purchasing business. All of the above actions can be regarded as the perfection of Taobao's entire online retail industry chain. And Jingdong mall, fan Ke Cheng pin and other related logistics are actually for the same purpose.

But from another point of view, when the industry is mature, enterprises should grasp the core and outsource some small profits.

" Outsourcing non core parts "In this regard, we can see that Taobao launched the" open platform ", the third party open platform to be launched by Jingdong mall, and the recent launch of V+, etc., is all for the same purpose.

"Enterprises should seize the core", the core of which is, from the known cases, at least including payment and logistics. In terms of payment, the value of PayPal will probably exceed eBay.com itself, and in logistics, research shows that in the 09 year, Amazon's investment in Fulfilled by Amazon increased by only 18% compared to that of the previous year, but its revenue was around 300%, with a very high ROI.

Therefore, on the one hand, Alipay is being split to facilitate its better development; on the other hand, Taobao has invested more and more in logistics.

2, Taobao big logistics plan will have insufficient capacity to control partners.

In the field of logistics, from the current trajectory, Taobao is adopting a gradual and progressive approach. It is not to use the whole industry chain first (the whole logistics industry chain mainly includes two parts: warehousing and express). After the industry is mature, outsourcing the non core links, but choosing to grasp the core link of the entire logistics industry chain -- warehousing part (warehousing, warehousing, sorting, packaging, shipping). And in warehousing part is not entirely autonomous operation, but with third party joint venture way. This is quite different from Amazon's practice. Amazon has all its own operations in warehousing.

There are various indications that under the existing logistics strategy of Taobao, Taobao's ability to control partners is not strong enough, and the whole logistics system is obviously insufficient. As for this analysis, the following is a brief introduction to the history of Taobao's involvement in logistics.

2.1 Taobao logistics development history

　　 Alibaba Logistics can be traced back to 2006. At that time, Alibaba launched cooperation with China Post to launch the "e postal treasure" specially designed for electronic commerce. After 2008, it shared with Terry Gou, chairman of Hon Hai group, Zhejiang Baishi logistics technology, which was founded by Zhou Shaoning, the former president of Google Greater China. In November 26, 2009, it officially launched the Taobao cooperative distribution center; in March 29, 2010, it became an official shareholder. And recently launched the Taobao logistics plan.

2.2 about Taobao logistics plan

Before understanding Taobao logistics plan, first of all, we briefly introduce the two choices of domestic B2C enterprises in logistics mode.

One is to entrust the third party logistics company to deliver goods, such as Dangdang, because it basically entrusts third party logistics companies, so the quality of service is also in the hands of others, uneven, good and bad. The other is the self built logistics system, such as Jingdong mall, van Kee pin, etc. its advantage is that the quality of service can be controlled. However, the self built logistics team brings more investment cycles and higher investment pressure.

Taobao big logistics plan can be considered as a compromise way, want to avoid the shortcomings of the above two ways. The core of the plan includes three parts: API interface fully open Taobao logistics platform (http://e56.taobao.com), logistics partner system and logistics service standard system.

The system currently includes seven types of partners, namely, the establishment of logistics park construction and management basis for investors; service providers providing process and operation standards; transportation and distribution service providers providing transportation and distribution services; ISV management software providers providing technical support and data interfaces; suppliers of packaging materials for various packaging and packaging designs; processing and after-sales service circulation processing service providers; and circulation financing service providers providing circulation financing services. In addition, Taobao logistics has launched a logistics service standard system, which includes unified service standard, unified partner flow and unified buyer purchase experience.

The analysis found that Taobao and Jingdong mall There are obvious differences in the layout of logistics between the two. Jingdong is a clear way to eat the entire logistics industry chain, not only for warehousing, but also for most of the express delivery. The current choice of Taobao is to grasp only the warehousing part of the logistics industry chain, and the way to get involved is to use joint venture to build together, while in the express delivery part, almost all of them are completed through third parties.

2.3 Taobao's existing logistics scale is about 10% of Jingdong mall.

from Taobao Logistics At present, the scale is relatively small. At present, the specific operating units include the star storehouse, Baishi warehouse, Andrew warehouse, Wuzhou warehouse, Huaqiang warehouse, etc. the peak value of daily delivery capacity is around 24000 pieces. According to this data, the peak annual shipment volume is about 8 million 760 thousand pieces. In addition, the data provided by Taobao show that in 2009, the number of Taobao express packages exceeded 600 million, and it is estimated that this figure will reach about 1 billion 200 million in 2010.

According to the above data, if Taobao's existing logistics and warehousing capacity is available, the peak value will only cover the order quantity of Taobao 0.73% (0.0876/12), the order amount will be about 3 billion RMB, and the actual order volume will be much lower than this figure, which may be only 1/3 of this figure. Corresponding to this is the typical representative of B2C enterprises, Jingdong mall 2010 turnover is expected to exceed 10 billion yuan. According to this data, Taobao's logistics and warehousing capacity is only about 10% of the Jingdong mall.

2.4 the maturity of Taobao logistics system needs to be improved.

From the maturity of Taobao logistics, there are also many problems. In December 09, industry professionals entered the warehouse of Taobao Shanghai for two times. It is found that there are still many deficiencies. For example, the layout of warehouses is not designed according to the logical characteristics of e-commerce. In the aspect of IT system, it can be found from the nuances that it is insufficient to deal with large scale small orders. Besides, from the perspective of personnel quality, there is also a lack of professionalism.

The reason for the analysis is that Taobao has followed the previous strategy to enter the market with the cooperation of the third parties, but the warehousing and sorting business has not raised it to a certain strategic level as Taobao did.

And from another point of view, because of its large number of partners and uneven quality, the strategic vision is different. For example, "Baishi logistics" wants to do the whole industry chain, but the star is eager to do cloud logistics.

　　 Discovery of billion States :

In view of the above analysis, the last part gives a brief summary of Taobao logistics.

1, Taobao's investment in warehousing and logistics can better improve the entire online retail industry chain. Under mature circumstances, it can bring great convenience to sellers and consumers, and can significantly improve the efficiency of commercial circulation.

2, in the long run, warehousing and logistics services will probably become one of Taobao's core competitiveness, which is similar to Amazon's Fulfilled by Amazon service.

3, Taobao's logistics system is obviously insufficient at present, the participants are too many, Taobao's ability to control the parties is weak, and in the competition with B2C Jingdong, logistics is one of the biggest weaknesses.

Billion proposal:

Based on the above point of view, the state power research center recommends:

In the case of extremely imperfect domestic logistics system, for Taobao, the layout of the logistics industry should be increased as a whole. The strategy can be tentatively explored, the whole industry chain in the medium term is arranged, and only the core part is retained at the later stage. In the early stage of operation, in the initial stage, joint ventures can be used to test the logistics market. This is the current practice of Taobao. In the medium term, it can take as many ways as possible to get through the whole logistics industry chain. In the later stage, the core part of the logistics industry should be retained only when the whole logistics industry is ripe enough to separate the non core part of the profits from the whole logistics industry.

In addition, because the total investment in the whole industrial chain is larger and the cycle is longer, the specific operational level can be determined according to the development of direct competitors such as Jingdong mall.