After deadly bombings, tightened delivery rules could lead to Singles Day logistics nightmare

China’s massive Singles Day online shopping holiday is coming right up on November 11. It’s a holiday that, last year, saw China’s shoppers spend well over US$9 billion in 24 hours and left logistics companies scrambling to deliver 278 million packages – and that’s just from orders on Alibaba platforms! All of China’s online sellers put up massive numbers on Singles Day, and the resultant crush on the country’s courier and delivery systems gets worse every year as the numbers go up.

This year looks set to be especially bad, though. Just as I predicted, Chinese authorities are clamping down on parcel delivery security in the wake of the deadly parcel bombings earlier this month.

The new rules have just been announced. That means that logistics companies and ecommerce logistics operations now have less than three weeks to fully integrate the changes before their systems get overloaded by tens of millions of orders in the space of a single day. And what’s required of them is significant. Among the changes:

• Package senders must register with their real identities
• Delivery companies must inspect parcels before packaging and delivering them
• Delivery services must inspect all parcels and envelopes via x-ray

Some of these are things delivery companies should have been doing anyway, of course. But lax enforcement has led to a situation where thorough inspection of packages is apparently rare. If Chinese authorities can follow through and enforce these new rules, it could lead to big slowdowns and backups as logistics companies struggle to comply with the new rules while simultaneously processing the massive deluge of Singles Day orders.

That could be bad for consumers, as it means many will likely get their items later. But the real potential victim here is ecommerce outfits. The longer an item takes to arrive, the more time the buyer has to reconsider their purchase – or just go out to a mall and buy the item in real life. If deliveries are slowed significantly it could lead to a higher-than-usual number of returns for ecommerce firms in the wake of the holiday.

UPDATE: This article previously said that Alibaba delivered 40 million packages, but that was just the number delivered in three days. The total number of Singles Day packages delivered by Alibaba was 278 million.