The basic principle is a simple one, a letter could be sent to any address in the UK at the universal rate. There would be no surcharges just because you lived in a remote part of Wales. Equally there would be no discount because you lived next to the sorting office in London and wanted to send a letter to the next street.
In the UK we did celebrate Rowland Hill and his work, sadly times have changed and successive Conservative governments have undermined the universal postal service by privatisation and trying to make it 'better' with 'competition'. Hence, rather than one Royal Mail van delivering letters and parcels there is now a small fleet of other delivery vans and outsourced casual labour 'gig economy' type delivery options. It is not more efficient to send six different vans out to a small village, each of them delivering one or two items when you could have just the one Royal Mail van carrying a few dozen parcels.
Moving on from 1837 to today where ecommerce and email has changed things, there is the 'ePacket', not very well understood by most end consumers. Here is an article on Shopify that helps explain the fundamentals:
Now I am no fan of the 'evils of global capitalism', however, I believe that the work done by China Post and their partners in 30+ countries is very much in the spirit of 'the Penny Black'. If your business in the West does have product made in China for good reasons, e.g. that is where your supply chain is, then you want to get your products to customers in good time. Why send a crate of product to your local warehouse to then have people then resend that on to customers when you can have a pick and pack operation in China?
This is particularly the case if you are wanting to offer your product to people internationally. For instance, Australia. If you have production facilities in China and then have a head office and warehouse in the UK, you can't realistically sell to the Australian market if it takes weeks for your parcels from the UK to get there, inevitably spending a week doing nothing in the Netherlands en-route. It makes customer service a non-starter. What you really want, and what your customer really wants is the China Post ePacket service and no extra trip for your products around the planet.
This applies for premium products people want, not the forged knock-off product that people berate Amazon for. ePacket helps the small to medium sized business compete against the giants of industry that can afford their own planes.
There is no 'win' for American innovation here, this is like a 'tariff' in that it is actually a 'tax' on American consumers. ePacket was as bit as innovative as 'the Penny Black' and it facilitates trade on a level playing field.
I am sure that knee-jerk reactions will mod-down my opinions on this, however, the ePacket and how we got here is not understood that well and going Donald Trump on parcel delivery is not going to solve the problems and frictions that genuinely exist with the status quo.
In terms of supply chain set-up, particularly the distribution part of it, there always is a warehouse somewhere. Even the parts you are buying from China are seeing multiple warehouses, sortation centers and cross-docking sites before they arrive at you destination.
Right now the low shipping costs for parcel-sized orders make this set-up, with stock as far from customers as it probably can, economic. Once this cost advantage is gone the last-mile performance from "local" warehouses, read warehouses on the same continent or in the same country, is winning the day.
In short, it is likely that the majoprity of the inventory is moved from China to the individual markets by someone. If this Amazon that would mean competition for seller doing drop-ship out of China. Still, even Amazon is offering FBA-services for the procurement part from China using Amazon container lines. Or it is some sort of wholeseller who is just covering the import part, maybe even up to warehousing.
I see a business opportinity for a logistics provider offering bulk-import, storage and distribution for the existing dropshippers. Workling interfaces to Shopify and co. wouldn't hurt neither.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowland_Hill
The basic principle is a simple one, a letter could be sent to any address in the UK at the universal rate. There would be no surcharges just because you lived in a remote part of Wales. Equally there would be no discount because you lived next to the sorting office in London and wanted to send a letter to the next street.
In the UK we did celebrate Rowland Hill and his work, sadly times have changed and successive Conservative governments have undermined the universal postal service by privatisation and trying to make it 'better' with 'competition'. Hence, rather than one Royal Mail van delivering letters and parcels there is now a small fleet of other delivery vans and outsourced casual labour 'gig economy' type delivery options. It is not more efficient to send six different vans out to a small village, each of them delivering one or two items when you could have just the one Royal Mail van carrying a few dozen parcels.
Moving on from 1837 to today where ecommerce and email has changed things, there is the 'ePacket', not very well understood by most end consumers. Here is an article on Shopify that helps explain the fundamentals:
https://www.shopify.co.uk/blog/epacket-delivery-explained-ev...
Now I am no fan of the 'evils of global capitalism', however, I believe that the work done by China Post and their partners in 30+ countries is very much in the spirit of 'the Penny Black'. If your business in the West does have product made in China for good reasons, e.g. that is where your supply chain is, then you want to get your products to customers in good time. Why send a crate of product to your local warehouse to then have people then resend that on to customers when you can have a pick and pack operation in China?
This is particularly the case if you are wanting to offer your product to people internationally. For instance, Australia. If you have production facilities in China and then have a head office and warehouse in the UK, you can't realistically sell to the Australian market if it takes weeks for your parcels from the UK to get there, inevitably spending a week doing nothing in the Netherlands en-route. It makes customer service a non-starter. What you really want, and what your customer really wants is the China Post ePacket service and no extra trip for your products around the planet.
This applies for premium products people want, not the forged knock-off product that people berate Amazon for. ePacket helps the small to medium sized business compete against the giants of industry that can afford their own planes.
There is no 'win' for American innovation here, this is like a 'tariff' in that it is actually a 'tax' on American consumers. ePacket was as bit as innovative as 'the Penny Black' and it facilitates trade on a level playing field.
I am sure that knee-jerk reactions will mod-down my opinions on this, however, the ePacket and how we got here is not understood that well and going Donald Trump on parcel delivery is not going to solve the problems and frictions that genuinely exist with the status quo.