If you have often bought different products on AliExpress so far, you are almost certainly familiar with that magical option of free postage. True, the products take a little longer to be delivered, but, you will agree, almost none of the users choose express mail because its price can exceed the value of the product itself many times over, writes Netokracija.
However, as we were caught by the SARS-CoV-2 virus pandemic this year, we can add the abolition of the free shipping option for most products from this site to the list of things that went wrong in 2020. However, various shipping options are still available, but they are too expensive, even for the cheapest products, writes Netokracija.
One of the main reasons for that is the economic crisis caused by the mentioned pandemic, which significantly affected the air traffic regime, both commercial and cargo type (modified passenger planes used exclusively for cargo transport), while other modes of transport drastically felt the crisis in your skin.
Through a conversation with Petar Vojinovic, founder and editor-in-chief of the aviation portal Tango Six, as well as with Mirko Ilic, CEO of cargo-partner in Serbia, on the part of the aviation industry, Netokracija analyzed the current price increases at the store, given that the crisis in air transport it has hit everyone, even the global e-commerce sector.
At the very beginning of the conversation, Mirko explains that the goods we order from AliExpress or some other larger global online store are usually transported by air. As he says, due to the cancellation of passenger flights in the last few months, cargo planes were overloaded with PPE equipment (personal protective equipment), which increased the prices of air transportation.
Due to the global pandemic, the transport of this equipment had a much higher priority, so the shippers of PPE equipment could afford higher transport rates. This in a way clogged the transport of other goods by air, so due to the poorer availability of aircraft, the price of postage itself jumped significantly.
In fact, what is very important and what Mirko puts in the foreground is that the time of delivery of goods to the end customer has increased due to new customs procedures introduced due to the pandemic, which imply increased border control. Here, too, PPE equipment is treated with priority, explains Ilic and adds:
“Many shipments were also delayed due to transhipment or insufficient number of trucks available. In principle, if the buyer does not receive the ordered goods within the promised time, he can request a refund. To avoid this, sellers on Aliexpress decided to pay higher shipping prices and the goods were delivered to them faster. As a result, the end customer bore those increased costs.”
Mirko especially points out another reason for the increase in postage, and that is that some Chinese sellers did not have enough orders to fill the reserved transport space (remember that we were worried about whether the coronavirus could be infected through packages from China), which is resulted in an increase in the price of transport per unit of product.
However, he estimates that for Netokracija, other types of transport should not be forgotten:
“In such situations, users should be treated responsibly. Rail transport has remained a fairly reliable option during the coronavirus crisis and is a stable alternative during closed border crossings. It is environmentally friendly and offers significantly faster transit times than maritime transport and many of our customers are have used this alternative in recent months. Otherwise, in the cargo-partner company we remain in close communication with our customers and offer them flexible alternatives for their transport needs. In addition to charter flights for time-critical shipments, we also provide a variety of solutions for rail traffic between China and Europe via the New Silk Road.”
Looking through the prism of someone who has been following air traffic and aviation for a long time, we were interested in what attitudes Petar Vojinovic has on a given topic of the crisis of transport of goods, both from global e-commerce sites and from other sources. As he said, the current virus simply affected everyone, and as it is known, transporting cargo by plane is the fastest and most practical way of transport, but far from being immune to the new crisis:
The volume of business has decreased globally, there has been a slowdown in economies, so there are victims and supply chains, also by air. As we have seen in the first weeks of the corona crisis, there has been a dramatic increase in transport, even by plane, of personal protective equipment for medical workers, respirators and other medical equipment.
Vojinovic also adds that a large amount of cargo, the smaller, more practical ones, such as shipments from Aliexpress, are transported in the cargo warehouses of regular passenger planes. As he says, passenger planes suddenly stopped flying, and for example, 75% of them globally did not fly for at least two months, which led to a major disruption of this type of transport.
Petar also takes the data of the global association of airlines IATA as an example, and so the statistics showed that the total cargo volume dropped by 28% in April compared to the same month in 2019.
Peter especially makes it known that of all types of transportation, transporting cargo by plane is among the most expensive options. Agreeing with Mirko, he says that there are other excellent transport options and adds that transportation by boat is cheaper, but slower, while transportation by rail is also slow, but in crown conditions it is also the most practical.
At the very end, Vojinović says that goods that are time-critical are most often transported by plane, either because of their characteristics or because of the need to deliver them faster. Cargo planes travel between only a few large airports, so-called cargo hubs, and then are either transported by slightly smaller planes to destinations or more often by road.
Given that we now know some of the specific reasons why we are not able to buy cheaply from AliExpress, we can only hope that the situation with shipping will improve (and here we are talking specifically about Serbia, given that postage for some countries in the region unchanged), Blic reports.
