introduce

The Dragon Boat Plan is actually an FBA first-leg warehousing service provided by Amazon. The first-leg service of this plan does not charge additional warehouse fees. Chinese sellers only need to deliver the goods to Amazon's warehouse in China and wait for the goods to be put on the shelves for sale. Amazon China officials will be responsible for a series of matters such as export customs clearance, transportation, import customs clearance, and warehousing of goods.

Regional scope

In terms of scope, the Dragon Boat Project basically covers the countries where the major sites of the cross-border e-commerce platform Amazon are located, including North America (the United States, Canada, Mexico), Europe (the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, etc.), and Asia (China and Japan). At present, the main collection places in China are Beijing and Tianjin in North China, Shanghai and Ningbo in East China, Shenzhen and Guangzhou in Guangdong, Xiamen in Fujian, and Hong Kong, China. Amazon has more warehouses in these places, and the transportation is convenient. I believe that with the increase of Amazon's warehouses in China, its collection places will gradually increase in the near future.

process

Chinese factory/seller--Amazon China warehouse--customs export--transportation--customs import--Amazon warehouse--end customer.

Application Requirements

Applications must be made in the name of the company. Individual seller accounts are not accepted to apply for the Dragon Boat Program.

Import qualifications of the destination country are required: the United States (Bond application), Europe (EORI application), Japan (POA signing).

Application Steps

1. Register ship.amazon.cn (Amazon's online booking and payment system) and submit the required seller-related materials to Amazon.

2. The materials that the seller needs to fill in and submit are:

1) Color scans of the seller's business license and tax registration certificate (or a combined scan of the three certificates)

2) Lock-up Application Form

3) New Customer Registration Form

4) Information on the parties to the electronic contract

3. After the seller receives the email from [email protected], he/she signs the electronic contract and waits for Amazon’s review.

4. After completing steps 1 and 2, Amazon will enable lock-up permissions and activate the seller’s account on ship.amazon.cn.

5. Open an account in the shipping logistics system. After registering on the official website, submit the seller's company information. Amazon will then require the seller to add a bank account in the system for future shipping costs, online orders, settlement fees, etc.

6. Purchase Bond and POA. Bond and POA are used for customs clearance in the United States. Bond is a kind of security deposit that US importers need to purchase from the customs. Bond is generally divided into one-time and annual. For importers who frequently import goods within a year, it is recommended to purchase an annual bond. The POA authorization letter is permanent and only costs more than one hundred US dollars. After that, the seller will be given a Bond number and a POA number. When shipping, the information shows that both numbers will be used.

Mode of transport

By sea and air, no express service

effect

The biggest benefit that the “Dragon Boat Plan” currently brings to sellers is locking their positions.

The so-called warehouse locking means that the FBA shipping plan of the entire batch of goods under the same Amazon account is locked in the Longzhou warehouse, avoiding the system from splitting the entire batch of goods and distributing them to various FBA warehouses across the United States. This significantly reduces the head-end cost and shortens the time to put the goods on the shelves.

Basic rules for locking positions

Standard goods will be locked to ONT8, oversized goods will be locked to IND5, and clothing and jewelry will be locked to SDF8.

Influence

The Dragon Boat Project helps sellers save a lot of time and financial costs in terms of logistics methods and costs. It also eliminates unreliable links such as freight forwarders and head-leg, making sellers' cargo transportation cheaper, faster and more stable.

For middlemen and traders, there are more challenges. The Dragon Boat Plan has lowered the threshold for manufacturers/manufacturers to enter Amazon. In the past, an important factor that prevented manufacturers from doing well in cross-border e-commerce was the cumbersome retail and logistics aspects, and it was difficult to recruit professional employees to do these things.

Illegal operation

The premise for locking the goods into the Dragon Boat warehouse is that the goods must be transported through Amazon's official channels. Currently, there are a few sellers in the market who, after placing an order with Dragon Boat to lock the warehouse, entrust the goods to unofficial freight forwarders for transportation, because there are freight forwarders in the market with cheaper freight rates than official channels. Doing so apparently minimizes the cost of the first leg, but in fact there is a risk of Amazon closing the Dragon Boat account at any time. Because Amazon will check and compare the actual amount of goods that Dragon Boat sellers have received and the amount of goods entrusted to them for transportation at any time, and thus determine the amount of goods that the account has lost. Amazon is cleaning up such accounts batch by batch, and so far, several batches of Dragon Boat accounts have been closed.

References

• 1. How to save FBA first-mile fees, what you need to know about Amazon Dragon Boat Plan: Sohu [cited on 2016-07-19T16:00:00.000Z]