Courier companies switching to contactless deliveries
February 25, 2020 Category China News Round-up, Weekly
Chinese e-commerce and courier companies are fast embracing contactless delivery to meet rising demand from health-conscious Chinese consumers who are staying indoors due to the Covid-19 outbreak. Contactless delivery refers to dropping off take-away food parcels or other packages at a designated pick-up spot in residential communities or on office premises to prevent transmission of the virus by direct contact between the consumers and the deliverymen. Meituan-Dianping, the country’s leading on-demand service platform, first announced an in-app function for contactless delivery in late January. The feature was launched first in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, and then expanded to 184 cities.
Missfresh, an online fresh food platform, said it plans to build a storage area at 5,000 residential communities in Shanghai for consumers to pick up their parcels. It plans to introduce such facilities next in Suzhou, Nanjing and other cities in Jiangsu province. Insiders said contactless delivery is being preferred by everyone these days, which is expected to drive the development of intelligent lockers operated with a QR code. So far, more than 150,000 medium and large e-commerce platforms have delivered over 160,000 daily orders in Wuhan where the outbreak first erupted. In Beijing nearly 20,000 deliverymen deliver more than 400,000 orders each day, according to the Beijing Market Regulation Bureau.
Contactless delivery is considered a natural evolution of current practices in the courier industry, and could make the service more efficient and hygienic, according to Wang Zhibin, Researcher with the National Engineering Laboratory for Logistics Information Technology in Shanghai. “The percentage of contactless deliveries is expected to increase, which will further spur the development of intelligent lockers, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as well as self-driving delivery cars in the future.” More than 406,000 intelligent lockers were installed in major Chinese cities last year, up from 127,000 in 2018, according to the State Post Bureau of China, as reported by the China Daily.
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