> Liu also bought items on Amazon.cn only to find disappointment, as it took him two days to receive them. “How could they call that two-day delivery,” Liu said.
What is he saying?
What is he saying?
Amazon is using proven multi-decade logistics companies for delivery, so it's pretty certain their internal cost structures are rational.
How much are the JD trucks and delivery guys being paid? How above board is JD's finances? What are they getting from the governments? Perhaps it's just another WebVAN.
These things are never quite clear in China, transparency and public audits are not present.
They pay market rate, and that's nothing unreal when most Chinese live in densely built up apartment blocks (a big difference from USA)
Shanghai minimum wage is 2500 RMB/mo. So in order to make minimum wage, this guy would need to make 500 orders in 30 days, or 16 deliveries per day. In an 8 hour day, could he pick up and make 16 deliveries? Sure, but it's tight, and obviously at some point, they have to pay the delivery guys more.
And they have, but in order for O2O players to pay more to the delivery people, they've ended up charging more to the restaurants, and so the restaurants have then ended up raising the prices on the menus displayed.
So this indicates that the current O2O system in China wasn't stable. Despite massive revenues, the heavy competition, discounts, and artificially low introductory fees, and ease of switching, doesn't give me confidence their current structure will work.
And 饿了吗‘s logistics seem pretty chaotic to me and no different than Postmates or Doordash in the US. I rarely saw delivery bikes loaded down with multiple orders, because 15-30 minute delivery windows pretty much dictate a point-to-point delivery, rather than a hub and spokes model.
In Russia, we had same day delivery even in very first eCommerce site back in nineties, and even e-groceries. That was just much a much smaller market, and the fact that 90% of country's economy was in Moscow back then was helping.
China today is not much different with 5 megacities making 90% of eCommerce trade volume.
Are stationed in China?
Edit: My mandarin is elementary school level, but there's a similar quote in the source article that sounds like "therefore they call it 2 day delivery"