Alibaba Group is aiming for more international sales than ever at its forthcoming ‘Global Shopping Festival’ on November 11, with logistics subsidiary Cainiao expanding transportation routes and cross-border sales unit AliExpress offering faster deliveries.
Some 800 million people in China and worldwide are expected to participate in this year’s 11.11. online sales extravaganza. It will feature some 250,000 brands, more than 2 million new products, double the number of ‘shopping windows’, more digital innovations, livestreamed entertainment and other activities, according to the Chinese e-commerce giant.
Notably, Alibaba will expand sales exposure for brands by adding a shopping window from November 1 to 3, ahead of the main event on November 11, “with the aim of providing merchants, specifically new brands and small businesses, the opportunity to showcase their products and tell their brand stories amid the pandemic.”
“The pandemic has fundamentally changed consumer shopping preferences and accelerated digital transformation of many businesses. Through our expansion from ‘single’ to ‘double,’ 11.11 will be offering more opportunities for merchants both online and offline to engage with consumers as well as provide a better consumer experience overall,” said Jiang Fan, President of Taobao and Tmall.
Faster international deliveries
This year’s event will have the largest international presence since it was founded in 2009. AliExpress now sells to more than 200 countries and regions worldwide, while Lazada will again run the shopping festival in its six markets in Southeast Asia.
This means that Alibaba Group’s rapidly expanding international logistics operations will again be vital to the success of the event. Logistics subsidiary Cainiao is ramping up delivery operations, pre-stocking popular items in domestic and international warehouses and is adopting more artificial-intelligence technologies.
For deliveries outside China, over 700 chartered flights will support about 90% of Cainiao’s parcel deliveries. That will shave 60% off delivery time for more than half of them, due to an algorithm that calculates and consolidates parcels directed to the same destination regardless of the location of their departure.
For China-bound packages, Cainiao will operate 3,000 chartered flights and long-haul cargo ships to meet the rising demand for imported goods.
Cainiao already announced in June that it would invest RMB 1 billion (US$140m) in more flights and overseas warehouses to speed up deliveries from China to the rest of the world, ramping up to a total of 1,260 chartered flights over the following nine months to halve delivery times to 3-5 days. Since then, new flights have been launched from China/Hong Kong to Europe and South America.
European trucking network
In Europe, Cainiao has set up a road freight distribution network by working with local last-mile delivery providers and using advanced algorithms to generate the most efficient loading plans and transportation routes for its fleet, as well as the optimal number of trucks to deploy, in real time.
This means it is now able to connect warehouses and transport hubs in Spain, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, achieving three-day delivery in Spain, France and Poland, and five to seven days in other European countries.
All this will enable AliExpress to offer faster deliveries for European shoppers at this year’s Global Shopping Festival, reducing average delivery times by up to 30%.
