The world is shrinking. The internet has brought consumers and products closer than ever, regardless of how many miles separate them. Global online sales were in excess of US$4.2trn in 2020, having grown at a rate of 25% per year, according to a report from Apex Insights. And it’s expected that global eCommerce will approach $5 trillion by 2021.
For shippers, 3PLs, and other logistics professionals, those booming eCommerce numbers led to an unprecedented number of parcels being shipped. According to Apex, the global parcels market exceeded US$500 billion in value in 2020, up from just under US$450 billion in 2018.
With that kind of growth, it only makes sense that retailers and eCommerce players are expanding into global markets to get their fair share. And even those that haven’t, have plans to do so in the future.
According to the Visa Global Merchant eCommerce Study, 66 percent of businesses that sell online are already selling cross-border, accounting for almost 31 percent of their revenue. Additionally, cross-border eCommerce is not about to slow down, with 66 percent of businesses not currently selling internationally planning to do so soon.
This has led to organizations adopting omnichannel fulfillment strategies to ship from inventory sources closer to consumers. The goal is to keep transportation costs down and provide faster delivery to consumers that have come to expect free shipping within very short timeframes.
However, omnichannel fulfillment introduces new parcel management challenges, especially when it comes to cross-border shipping.
Challenges in International Parcel Management
A report from Statista showed that the joint top challenges facing companies engaged in cross-border eCommerce were cross-border logistics and cross-border returns, each with 43.4 percent of respondents citing these as an expected issue.
But those are just some of the issues shippers will face as they expand their use of an omnichannel shipping strategy, especially as they evolve into an international shopping and shipping company. From customs compliance to local delivery wherever local might be, mastering the global parcel chain will take a new set of skills and the right parcel management solution.
Pierbridge joined PARCEL Magazine Jan 2020, for a webinar spotlighting global parcel chain trends and some of the things omnichannel and global shippers need to know to not only keep up with trends but get ahead of them, and they still hold true today.
Register today for a replay of the webinar “The State of Parcel Shipping 2020 - The Rise of the Global Parcel Chain."