Practitioners engaged in cross-border e-commerce have recently generally felt that the development direction of the industry is undergoing a significant change.
First, TikTok Shop tightened its self-delivery authority, and then Temu increased its logistics control. Recently, SHEIN also issued an announcement to crack down on illegal operations such as “floating orders” and “false orders”.
The three major cross-border e-commerce platforms took action almost simultaneously, targeting self-delivery channels.
Many sellers previously believed that this was just a routine rectification action on the platform, and that the industry would return to its original state after the limelight passed. However, industry analysts pointed out that this was not an isolated violation cleanup operation, but an important turning point for the entire cross-border e-commerce industry. The era of making profits by relying on self-delivery and extensive distribution of goods has completely ended.
Behind the platform’s collective rectification of self-delivery: chaos in three major industries has touched the bottom line of development
It is not accidental that self-delivery has become the platform’s key rectification target. The chaos accumulated in this model for a long time has touched the core interests of the platform and has reached a point where rectification is necessary.
First, false shipments and postage fraud are repeatedly prohibited.
Some sellers take advantage of loopholes in the rules and use virtual warehouse numbers and false orders to complete false shipments. The actual delivery time is far later than the time limit specified by the platform, resulting in buyers being unable to receive the goods; there are also illegal operations such as “floating orders” to steal the resources of formal logistics channels, which not only disrupts the market pricing system, but ultimately generates bad debts and negative reviews. All the bad debts and negative reviews are borne by the platform. Under the effect of bad money driving out good money, compliant sellers who ship on time are at a disadvantage in the price war.
Second, the quality of contract fulfillment is uneven, which lowers the shopping experience across the entire platform.
Under the self-delivery model, the platform cannot control the entire process of packaging, transportation, and delivery, and problems such as late shipments, lost items, and non-updated logistics information occur frequently.
Industry statistics show that the average negative review rate for self-delivered orders is 2.3 times that of the platform’s official logistics, and the order cancellation rate is nearly twice as high.
The decline in buyer experience directly leads to the loss of platform users, which is a core loss that the platform cannot accept.
Third, compliance risks continue to be transmitted, and platforms are unwilling to assume additional responsibilities.
A large number of self-delivered packages enter the country through low-value declarations and gray customs clearance channels. As customs supervision in various countries continues to strengthen, the proportion of illegal packages that are detained and returned continues to rise.
Once large-scale compliance issues arise, risks will be directly transmitted to the platform level. Tightening self-delivery authority and guiding sellers to follow compliant logistics channels are essentially the platform’s choice to proactively avoid operational risks.
The deep logic behind the rectification: after the traffic dividend peaked, platform competition turned to supply chain competition
What many practitioners have not seen clearly is that the platform has collectively tightened self-shipping rights. On the surface, it is to clean up violations, but in essence, the competitive logic of the cross-border e-commerce industry has completely changed.
When cross-border e-commerce was in the stage of rapid expansion in the past few years, the platform lacked merchants and the supply of goods was insufficient. The self-delivery model had a low threshold and could quickly put a large number of SKUs on the shelves, which was a great tool for the platform to expand the market scale.
But now the number of merchants on major platforms has reached saturation, traffic dividends have gradually peaked, industry competition has shifted from “grabbing merchants” to “grabbing users”, and the core of the competition has also shifted from the number of products to the shopping experience.
For the platform, the benefits of unifying logistics channels and promoting local fulfillment models are very clear: stable delivery timeliness and unified service standards can directly improve user experience; logistics and inventory data are all controllable, and operational efficiency will be greatly improved; compliance risks can also be controlled within acceptable limits.
Correspondingly, the platform traffic distribution will increasingly be tilted towards products shipped using official logistics and local warehouses. The weight of purely self-shipped products will continue to decrease, and the exposure will also decrease accordingly.
The self-delivery model will not completely disappear in the future, but it will be difficult to rely on this model to obtain large traffic and achieve high profits.
The seller’s transformation path is clear: different development stages correspond to different optimal choices
Practitioners do not need to be overly anxious. The self-shipping model will not completely disappear, but it is no longer suitable as the main operating model. Sellers can choose an adaptation path according to the development stage of their own stores to successfully complete the transition.
1. New store test period: compliant self-delivery is still applicable
Novice sellers who have just opened a store and are still in the product selection and testing stage do not need to invest a lot of money to prepare overseas warehouses from the beginning. Self-delivery is still a good choice for low-cost payment test, but the premise is that they must use formal logistics channels certified by the platform, strictly abide by delivery time requirements, and resolutely not touch illegal red lines such as false shipments and low declarations.
After running through the product selection logic and verifying the market demand, you can then consider upgrading the fulfillment model.
2. Growth sellers: direct shipment for testing + overseas warehouse delivery is the most cost-effective
For growth sellers who already have some stable SKUs, the safest way to operate is to “walk on two legs”: new products still use compliant self-shipping to test market response. Once stable sales are achieved, they will immediately be transferred to a third-party overseas warehouse for stocking.
Local delivery can not only improve delivery timeliness, increase conversion rate and store weight, but also gain more traffic support from the platform, and the growth space is much higher than the pure self-delivery model.
Sellers do not need to prepare large quantities of goods at once. Mature third-party overseas warehouse service providers generally support small batch warehousing. Sellers can replenish goods on a rolling basis based on sales volume. The cost of trial and error is very low, and the transition from direct shipping to local warehouses can be smoothly completed.
3. Large-scale sellers: Omni-channel local fulfillment builds core barriers
For sellers that have reached a certain operating scale, it is an inevitable choice to deploy third-party overseas warehouses shared by multiple platforms.
A set of inventory can be connected to multiple channels such as Amazon, TikTok Shop, and independent stations at the same time, without the need for repeated stocking by channel. It can not only increase inventory turnover rate, dilute warehousing costs, but also easily meet the logistics assessment requirements of each platform, making supply chain capabilities its core competitiveness.
In general, the dividend period for extensive cross-border e-commerce distribution has passed, and the next industry competition will eventually return to the essence of products and supply chains.
For ordinary sellers, instead of clinging to the old gameplay and waiting and resisting, it is better to actively adjust the rhythm of operations, starting from the local warehouse layout of hot-selling SKUs, and gradually building their own stable performance system, based on compliance and with service experience upgrade as the core, in order to gain a firm foothold in the new round of industry reshuffle.
