China's first cross-border distribution center set up in Nansha

The interior view of the cross-border public distribution center in Nansha Comprehensive Bonded Zone.[Photo/gznsnews.com.cn]

Tmall International, Alibaba's platform that provides commodities produced or sold in overseas markets, teamed up with Cainiao, Alibaba's smart logistics network, to open China's first cross-border public distribution center in Nansha Comprehensive Bonded Zone on Jan 12.

The center has more than 400 separate areas, allowing over 400,000 packages to be sorted according to different categories every day during peak periods.

The peak hours during which people generally place online orders are between 20:00 and 24:00. Packages used to be handled one day later, as the warehouses stopped taking orders by 20:30 due to the limitations of the settled distribution process of express companies. 

Chen Han, the person in charge of the distribution center, said that goods to be delivered from different warehouses in the same bonded area have to be declared to customs separately before being delivered to different express companies. This whole process used to take at least four hours.

Yet with the help of the new distribution center, packages of orders placed at night can also be handled on the same day without delay, allowing the packages to be delivered one day earlier than before.