Also, having a few freight forwarders keeps prices low via economies of scale. Each bag can be shared among many package lockers. Also, there is no working government run system for home addresses that are tied to individual homes like in the US, so the package locker takes on the responsibility, and liability, of making sure the package arrives at a predictable place.
Without package lockers which is what temu does, you have to coordinate in real time the delivery. Delivery is done during working hours. Not all people have free time to do this because hey are often at work so this results in a high delivery failure rate of 30 percent and logistics companies keep houses and warehouses full of undelivered packages.
And if the user complains because the package could not be delivered near their house, the logistics company assumes a penalty from temu and the user is granted a refund, and they can often pick up the package afterwards.
And taobao has a smaller local market relative to Amazon or other American ecommerce sites because it's in Chinese only and also due to that, Chinese package lockers are rare. However taobao is very cheap even cheaper than temu. Some small businesses buy in bulk from taobao for that reason to resell locally at twice the original sales+shipping price or more. Amazon is by far the most popular e-commerce site in Panama, so much so that yc backed local startups such as cuanto only specialize in artisanal and boutique items like Etsy does.
And of course the LLC is owned by the freight forwarder as a subsidiary or is the freight forwarder's parent company.
Btw, a popular business saying in Panama is that you should always sell at least twice the original purchase price.
Thanks for the rundown. Context for others: If you ever sell anything online to Doral FL, it's a freight forwarder. DE and OR (no sales tax), KY, and TX are also popular, but 90% of the time it's a FL address and 90% of the time it's Doral.
Without package lockers which is what temu does, you have to coordinate in real time the delivery. Delivery is done during working hours. Not all people have free time to do this because hey are often at work so this results in a high delivery failure rate of 30 percent and logistics companies keep houses and warehouses full of undelivered packages.
And if the user complains because the package could not be delivered near their house, the logistics company assumes a penalty from temu and the user is granted a refund, and they can often pick up the package afterwards.
And taobao has a smaller local market relative to Amazon or other American ecommerce sites because it's in Chinese only and also due to that, Chinese package lockers are rare. However taobao is very cheap even cheaper than temu. Some small businesses buy in bulk from taobao for that reason to resell locally at twice the original sales+shipping price or more. Amazon is by far the most popular e-commerce site in Panama, so much so that yc backed local startups such as cuanto only specialize in artisanal and boutique items like Etsy does.
And of course the LLC is owned by the freight forwarder as a subsidiary or is the freight forwarder's parent company.
Btw, a popular business saying in Panama is that you should always sell at least twice the original purchase price.