Breaking news! UPS has stopped accepting deliveries! My brother-in-law is also going to start an independent website

The COVID-19 pandemic became tense again before the New Year, causing difficulties in international express imports and exports.

Recently, a freight forwarder informed the seller that they had received a notice from the UPS agent that due to Amazon’s warehouse explosion, Amazon’s warehouse is no longer unloading UPS ’s goods. As a result, the UPS warehouse has too much goods piled up and is in a warehouse explosion state, so UPS will not accept any goods in the whole of Europe .

Currently, UPS is waiting for a response from Amazon, but has not yet given an exact time to resume receiving deliveries.

The transportation of goods in the entire European market has been delayed to varying degrees. The above-mentioned freight forwarder said that the orders that have been arranged for trailers have arrived in Germany and are waiting for unloading, and the delay is expected to be 2-4 working days ; the goods of the orders that have not been arranged for trailers are currently placed in temporary warehouses in Greece, and trailers can only be arranged after UPS gives a resumption of receiving time. It takes 4 days from Greece to Germany, and the delay is expected to be 7-9 working days .

In the European market, especially in the UK, due to the blockage of multiple logistics routes, some logistics platforms have implemented protection policies for sellers on this site.

In addition to UPS, the situation of FedEx is also not optimistic.

On January 7 , the Office of the Nanjing Municipal Joint Prevention and Control Command Center for the Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia Epidemic announced that on January 6 , 2021 , during routine inspections of imported goods by a company in Jiangbei New District, Nanjing, it was found that the test results of ground samples in an imported goods warehouse were positive for the new coronavirus nucleic acid (the warehouse stored imported goods transported to the company via FedEx ).

The city and district immediately activated the epidemic prevention and control emergency response mechanism, closed the company's warehouse involved in the epidemic, sealed the goods, suspended the transfer vehicles in and out of the warehouse, investigated the personnel involved in the express delivery company, and comprehensively carried out measures such as personnel investigation and isolation, sampling and testing, and site disinfection.

So far, 91 direct contacts and their close contacts have been investigated, all of whom have been put under centralized quarantine for medical observation and nucleic acid sampling and testing; nucleic acid sampling and testing of all 3,067 staff members and their families of the company have been completed. The nucleic acid test results of the above personnel are all negative, and there are no abnormalities in health monitoring.

Although international express delivery has become more difficult, the good news is that the price of air delivery from the United States has plummeted recently . Most of the quotations for general cargo are between 32 yuan /kg and 39 yuan /kg , and a small part is even as low as 28 yuan /kg .

Faced with the rising Shopify, Amazon could no longer sit still.

According to foreign media reports, Amazon has set up a "secret team" to study Shopify and is preparing to launch a "new online store model" to compete more directly with Shopify . It is understood that the team has absorbed dozens of Amazon executives and will be led by my brother-in-law himself .

Amazon, which has always been stable, attaches so much importance to and is so wary of a competitor. The hidden concern behind this may be the impact and collapse that the independent station ecosystem brings to the platform e-commerce ecosystem.

As we all know, Shopify does not sell any products, but mainly provides online services. It has no direct competitive relationship with Amazon.

But Shopify is constantly grabbing the attention of Amazon sellers. In the past 12 months, more and more Amazon sellers have turned to Shopify , and the number of active merchants on Shopify has now exceeded 1 million worldwide.

Why are more and more sellers turning to Shopify? Because for merchants, Shopify not only provides convenient website building services, but also lower commissions mean more profits.

For example, if a merchant sells a piece of clothing for $50 on Amazon, Amazon will earn $ 8.5 in commission; if the merchant chooses to advertise on Amazon, Amazon will earn at least another $ 6.5 ; if the merchant also uses Amazon Logistics, then Amazon's commission will be close to 40 % of the selling price. But if the merchant uses Shopify , the transaction fee is much lower.

In addition to small and medium-sized sellers, brands such as Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, Budweiser, WaterAid, Penguin Books , and Red Bull have all chosen Shopify services, and the independent station model has become one of the important ways for these brands to cultivate private domain traffic.

In addition, in the third quarter of 2020, Shopify 's quarterly revenue increased by 96.1% year-on-year, while Amazon's was only 37.39% . Driven by the epidemic, Shopify 's growth rate was more than 2.5 times that of Amazon. Today's Shopify is no longer the simple website building tool it was 15 years ago. It is already a listed company with a market value of more than 130 billion US dollars, integrating a variety of services.

Shopify's growth has made Amazon feel uneasy. Amazon even said at the last antitrust hearing that Shopify is its direct competitor . This is the first time that Amazon has officially confirmed its competition with Shopify .

So my brother-in-law took charge of it personally and put the self-operated independent station business on the agenda. He may even regard this project as a second venture to "recreate Amazon" in the next few years.

However, we have just started planning it and it is estimated that it will take several years to go online. Interested sellers can prepare first.

(Source: Seller Growth Academy)