"The Cross Border Logistics Stands at Whopping $900 bn in Asia": Wilson Chan, Buyandship

In 2014, a team of four creative minds in Hong Kong – Wilson Chan, Sheldon Li, Hang Poon, and Tsz Ming Wong – created Buyandship to address the glaring problem with cross-border e-commerce: shopping was simple, but receiving purchases was near impossible.  Today, nearly 500,000 Buyandship members enjoy limitless shopping across the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, Australia, Italy, Thailand, China, and Taiwan. On its blog and social media channels, Buyandship publishes a steady stream of product and deal news from around the world, allowing customers to immediately take advantage of big discounts and learn about new products and brands. The company also works directly with overseas sellers to deliver exclusive deals and offers unavailable anywhere else. In an exclusive conversation Wilson Chan, Chief-Executive Officer talks about potential market of cross border e-commerce.

Tell us about Buyandship including the business model and India journey so far?

We started with simple fare forward model where we are endeavoring to ease the cross border logistics with optimal solutions. We are trying to mitigate the huge disconnect between B2C market vs a traditional B2B markets, which is said to be a backbone of logistics for over last 200 years. Devoid of sufficient infrastructure forces customers in the traditional logistics players to look at marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart and all these different businesses.

Over last five years we have developed a business where we have marginalized the logistics chains and broke down each value chain element and try to find multiple vendors to marginalize the entire eco-system. This way, we have been able to reduce the operational cost by 30-50%, which is the boon for country like India where policy frame-work does not support B2B consumers (the way it does for B2C) and made them suffer a lot bureaucracy.

We are at aim to create a seamless buying experience so that an individual can consume goods domestically in India the same way he/she will do outside the country by re-tooling the logistics and leveraging duty free limit.

According to you what is the estimated size of cross border retailing in Asia Pacific region. It would be great if you can highlight few numbers? According to you, what are the factors propelling growth in this segment?

The current size of cross border logistics stands at whopping $900 bn dollars business in Asia alone. Other than domestic consumption, cross border trade is the main driver of this growth. The way goods move, we are already talking about global supply chain where things might be made in one country (including Vietnam, China, India amongst others) and shipped to other countries.

The consumer facing business in the vertical is witnessing 20-30% year on year growth. However, there is huge price difference between buying things domestically vs buying overseas due to exorbitant logistics involved in international shipping which at times make the price difference as high as 30-40%. As the result, merchants are unable to ship internationally and consumers are not able to buy from overseas market.We are trying to mitigate the problem by offering suitable logistics operations so goods can be bought domestic and also overseas. We are commited for easy and fast delivery.

Do you also onboard sellers from India? If yes, then kindly provide the details.

Right now we do not have export warehouse in India yet. However,We would be keen to explore export opportunities here. On one side, we are seeing great product/merchandise coming from India which has huge demand overseas, and the other side involve many Indian who are living overseas actually like to buy back from domestic market.

We would like to connect to ecommerce companies in India in future to help them sell overseas by the means of logistics and marketing support. We want to set-up export warehouses overseas with an aim to highlight buying trends from overseas to enlighten the Indian merchants.

What kind of response you are generating for Black Friday event? Pertaining to sale, what kind of brands and categories are receiving high traction especially in India?

Black Friday was huge event overseas; in fact, digital generates more than 20 percent growth this year.  The single day sale event caused $4.2 bn spent among this figure 34.5 percent sale was made online through Smartphones. Collectively $143 bn were spent making it largest Black Friday worldwide.

Marketplaces including ebay, Amazon were in lead in terms of high traction. Supplements, clothes and accessories, stationery, and consumer electronics are the top categories that Indian users buy from.

India actually made a lot of purchases from western fashion brands in Superdry, Ralph Loren, and Tommy Hifiger amongst others. However, the largest category was electronics. People wanted to buy new gadgets may be because local market is under serving them.

According to Buyandship, 80 percent of its Indian users are male. Indian shoppers buy products mainly from the US (78.4%), followed by the UK (10%) and Australia (8.6%).

 

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