Cainiao on 11.11: It’s all about speed and service

Cainiao is delivering more than 200 million packages to consumers’ doorsteps for this 11.11, with over 120 million already delivered and 80 million on their way.

“It’s all about speed and service for retailers and customers. We went to great lengths to ensure the speed and quality of our services,” Li Wuchang, who leads Cainiao’s 11.11 operations, explained in Mandarin in the run-up to the festival.

For orders generated in the first sales window of 11.11, Cainiao shortened the time between payment and fulfillment by over 3 hours compared with last year. The period between product dispatch by sellers and delivery completion also narrowed by almost five hours.

To be sure, supply chains remain under strain, and in China, retailers faced complex, changeable pandemic-related restrictions that complicated final-mile logistics and dragged down daily deliveries.

Domestic logistics companies handled a daily average of 389 million parcels during this 11.11, compared with roughly 425 million per day over last year’s shopping festival, per China’s Ministry of Transportation data.

Cainiao met these challenges head-on.

“We expanded our investment in technology installations, and the savings from increased efficiency were used to facilitate more doorstep deliveries for consumers,” said Li.

The platform even managed to reduce international delivery times in many cases.