Today, with the rapid development of science and technology, the field of cross-border e-commerce warehousing is ushering in a profound change.
On June 17, Cainiao opened a new European supply chain fulfillment center in the Netherlands, investing in more than 100 self-developed ZeeBot climbing robots.
This center radiates to the entire European market. It signed a 10-year lease with a total area of 26,000 square meters, including warehousing and office facilities. It is close to the Port of Rotterdam and has very convenient transportation.
This is not Cainiao’s first deployment in Europe this year.
In April, Cainiao opened new warehouses in the UK, France, Spain and Poland; in mid-May, Cainiao ZeeBot made a splash at the MODEX 2026 International Logistics Exhibition in the United States, triggering people’s thinking on whether warehousing work will be replaced by robots.
With questions about the role of robots in warehousing, we visited Cainiao’s exclusive AliExpress warehouse in Mayong, Dongguan.
In the 618 express delivery flood, the light and small items ordered by foreign consumers on AliExpress no longer rely on manual picking and handling by warehouse workers, but are directly delivered to the packaging table by 134 ZeeBot climbing robots.
Cainiao’s development of climbing robots was forced by cross-border e-commerce performance pressure.
The Dongguan warehouse manager said that the warehouse serves more than 40 countries in Europe, and the average daily outbound volume is huge, making the traditional manual warehouse model miserable.
Cross-border e-commerce warehousing faces problems such as large demand for warehouse space, high labor intensity for workers, and rising labor costs.
Previous warehouse automation solutions have failed to perfectly solve these pain points.
In this context, the rookie chose the climbing robot technology route.
In theory, it can solve the core pain points of cross-border warehousing, but there are many difficulties from theory to implementation.
Many domestic companies have tried to climb the robot track but have failed.
Although Cainiao launched the full-stack self-developed ZeeBot, it also faces many challenges.
First of all, ZeeBot claims to increase the floor efficiency by three times. However, in order to achieve the ultimate storage density, the cost of shelves has increased, and it can only handle standard light and small items. Special-shaped products still need to be processed manually, resulting in limited improvement in the actual floor efficiency of the entire warehouse.
Secondly, the so-called 100% orbit success rate is achieved under an ideal environment.
As the number of robots increases, the difficulty of three-dimensional cluster scheduling will soar exponentially, and the ground conditions of old overseas warehouses may affect the success rate of orbit entry.
Furthermore, doubling the human efficiency is the laboratory design value.
Under the high-intensity operation of 618, it remains to be verified whether the robot’s multiple strategies and efficiency can be stable, and whether automated inventory can completely replace manual labor.
From the perspective of the global market, ZeeBot needs to overcome difficulties such as ROI verification, large-scale delivery, and localized services from internal verification to large-scale commercialization.
Cainiao adopts the strategy of “internal incubation and external expansion”. Although it has advantages in various warehousing and logistics scenarios, its logistics technology after-sales service system needs to be improved.
Compared with overseas competitors, Cainiao has a cost advantage, but there are gaps in brand awareness, after-sales service and localization capabilities.
In the future, unmanned warehouses are a dream, but the current technical level is still difficult to realize.
Problems such as bottlenecks in the picking process, problems with automatic robot rescue, and insufficient robot generalization capabilities make the warehousing industry will adopt in-depth human-machine collaboration as the mainstream model in the foreseeable 3 to 5 years.
However, ZeeBot still represents an important development direction in warehousing automation and provides new solutions for cross-border warehousing pain points.
Future logistics robots will develop in a more flexible and intelligent direction.
