E-commerce sites such as eBay and Amazon.com arose when they did for a reason. The Internet first had to be invented, of course, and become a part of everyday life. They needed another thing, however: an efficient, reliable, nationwide system for delivering the stuff people ordered, in as little as a day, if requested. And in the U.S., that existed in the form of FedEx, United Parcel Service, and the U.S. Postal Service.
One of the challenges for Chinese e-commerce companies—Alibaba being the largest—is that this isn’t yet the case in China. While some consolidation has come lately, the Chinese shipping industry is still fragmented into lots of small companies that ferociously compete to undercut each other on price, and timeliness and package care often suffer.
