Overseas delivery service invigorates borderless online shopping malls

G-market expands delivery service to their customers abroad
Malltail emerges as a specialized overseas delivery service provider

Written by Gwang Il, Jeon / Young Il Hahn

[CLO] Today we are living in an era of extremely convenient shopping system along with the rapid growth of internet shopping malls.

What we call 'borderless shopping', which means we can purchase local and overseas goods whenever and wherever we want. In the past, the only way to buy branded goods or rare products was either to buy them at an expensive price in off-line market via official distribution company or to purchase them on site during an overseas trip.

However buyers got to purchase things without inconvenience as internet shopping market developed. A range of buyer's choice has broadened owing to increase in direct products sale at overseas site.

You can find default settings for category of overseas shopping at an integrated mall or at an open market. There are also popular shopping malls only specialized in selling overseas products like 'wizwid.com'. Nonetheless, this sort of malls have obvious restriction as to dealing with all type of products sold in overseas market. Focus on limited products that many consumers tend to go for could spontaneously lower the diversity of goods.

Therefore the number of consumers who try to search and purchase overseas goods by themselves have started to increase. This is noticeable from the fact that more and more consumers are buying products from 'amazon.com' or 'ebay.com'.

Certainly it is essential to have credit cards that payments can be made abroad as well as competence in English enough to place an order. But you will notice one complication come up in the course of giving an order. That's delivery.

Even though you purchase your most favorite goods at overseas shopping malls, it could be all just pie in the sky unless its home delivery is guaranteed. 'Amazon' or 'Ebay, which holds huge number of global customers, has less difficulty in international delivery while most of the others have trouble.

The opposite cases are arising as well. Recently the number of foreign consumers who wish to purchase goods via domestic shopping malls appeared to have increased probably affected by 'Korean Wave'. Accordingly some domestic shopping malls are trying to open an overseas site and preparing for selling goods through it.

In consideration of delivery problems, internet shopping malls are now being designed to make overseas delivery feasible. There are two types of overseas delivery, namely inbound and outbound. Inbound means by the process that a product is delivered to Korea from abroad and outbound is the opposite.

In outbound's case, most of domestic shopping malls have been designed and run in that way. The typical case could be 'G-market(gmarket.com)'s global delivery service.

The sellers in an integrated mall or an open market are usually different one another. This makes each seller difficult to deliver the goods abroad on its own. It is hard for the seller to make direct contract with overseas delivery company and besides delivery cost is quite high. G-market is solving such a problem by building its own logistics center in Suwon.

If an overseas consumer orders a commodity on G-market site, the domestic seller will send it to Suwon center first. Then G-market takes care of its delivery to the overseas client. This system helps attract customers from abroad and consequently raise the sales.

Here we can check the reverse case. Supposing you want to buy a piece of merchandise at 'Amazon' or 'Ebay', what would you do if domestic delivery was not provided? This time you may have to go to an alternate method as neither Amazon nor Ebay is in charge of logistics.

In this connection, the companies offering overseas delivery service such as 'malltail.com' site are emerging to solve the problem. This service is run and provided not by shopping malls but by independent logistics firms.

What would Malltail's logistics operation like? Malltail has set up a number of logistics centers in the US's New York and New Jersey, Japan and China. If the customers from the sites abroad input the address of Malltail's logistics centers when giving an order and then input the details of order on Malltail site, the company will undertake domestic delivery service from then on.

This means that once the overseas shopping mall dispatches the ordered goods to Malltail's center, the company starts to carry out domestic delivery based on the information registered by the customer.

Undoubtedly increase of such an overseas logistics service could be the catalyst for opening the age of borderless shopping, which is feasible at any time and anywhere.

contact us.
TEL. 82-2-3282-3864
FAX. 82-2-3282-3860
E-MAIL. wmumalmo@naver.com

*** 구독문의 02 3282 3850 (담당 이명순 대리)