DRONE DELIVERY SERVICE

As time goes by, many surreal things get real! Check one of them: when drone takes over human to deliver your goods… Well, drone delivery service has finally become real…

A Sky Full Of Drones

Well, at least soon or later, our sky will be full of drones! Believe it or not . As I used to say in my previous articles, “China is big, everyone!”. China is also full of online platforms that can spoil your life becomes more and more convenient. In other words, this condition creates an undeniable competition among the online platform providers. The key is, just like in logistics, how can the products reach my customer quickly and effectively.

In achieving this goal, China’s second largest e-commerce company, JingDong or JD.com is the first company that use drone to get to those hard-to-reach places. Why should we put more attention on those hard-to-reach places? The biggest volume of online retail sales may come from densely populated areas such as Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang. In contrast, the fastest growth has been in smaller, inland communities, where disposable incomes have increased.

JD.com’s drone test drive

This has become a some kind of ‘trend’ for those online platform providers or e-commerce companies in China. Alibaba, China’s no.1 largest e-commerce company, planned to use Beijing as a gateway to the some 400 million people in the less developed northern territories, whereas, Jingdong or JD.com started a program to teach them how to online shop.

Alibaba’s drone tea delivery service

Last year, Jingdong recruited about 150,000 village promoters to teach their neighbors how to use its website. The incentive is by paying them a commission for helping to get deliveries to the right homes. Now, the challenge is delivering packages to a village can be difficult because of geography and poor road conditions. For this very reason, Jingdong decided to use bright red flying robots in a test market, Jiangsu Province. Jingdong’s spokesman Josh Gartner said that the objective is to get packages to communities just 10 kilometers from bigger cities.

Jingdong’s strategy may be different from Amazon’s, that is to deliver directly to individual addresses. Jingdong’s strategy is to deliver multiple package to a single spot in each village. They need a bigger, stronger drones to carry multiple packages, and able to travel long distances. Jingdong hopes this plan can be able to perform same or next-day delivery to far-out villages and difficult-to-reach places.