Cainiao Network, the logistics arm of Alibaba Group Holding Limited, has rolled out targeted sustainability and consumer experience initiatives to improve this year’s Double 11 global shopping festival (Nov 11).
Cainiao has expanded its recycling campaign across more than 130,000 Cainiao Post stations this year – meaning nearly four million carton boxes have been collected, with a projection that six million carton boxes will be collected across the shopping event. Cainiao has also partnered with thousands of merchants such as Unilever and Yili Group, involving over 150,000 products, to reduce the carbon footprint of each parcel by 50g.
To improve the consumer experience, Cainiao engaged approximately 100,000 more part-time personnel in the lead-up to Double 11 to expand the reach of its doorstep delivery service. As a result, more than 120 million parcels have been delivered to consumers’ doorsteps, and this figure is expected to exceed 200 million during the entire span of Double 11.
Efforts have also been made to strengthen the last-mile delivery network encompassing Cainiao’s self-operated direct delivery services, Cainiao Post stations and courier partners, to instill greater stability and more timely deliveries. Cainiao also launched autonomous logistics robots in over 400 universities in China to deliver two million parcels (one-third of the total parcel volume in campuses) as of noon Nov 11.
For cross-border deliveries, Cainiao used its priority warehouses near the ports to ensure end-to-end delivery from merchant pickup to doorstep delivery in approximately 37 hours in South Korea. Cainiao’s 15 overseas warehouses in Europe also helped to achieve same or next-day deliveries within key European cities. For example, in France, goods dispatched from these overseas warehouses were delivered in as little as 2 hours 17 minutes. Overall, the delivery time from the point of goods dispatch by Chinese merchants to the last-mile delivery to overseas consumers has been reduced by close to five hours compared to last year.