Competition
The Internet, especially social networks, has stimulated rapid demand for innovative products which cause shrinking of the product life cycle. Manufacturers are trying to accelerate new inventions, productions, and commercialization. As a result, traditional distribution methods cannot keep up.
In addition, when a country's economy booms, its gross domestic product (GDP) increases and its middle class grows rapidly. High-income consumers have needs to improve their personal and family life experience to a higher level through ways of consuming unique, high-quality and smart products and spending more, but their needs cannot be fulfilled in their country. Therefore, either in developing countries or in developed countries, there is no single domestic market that can satisfy the fast-growing consumption demand. Nowadays, cross-border trades are on a significant rise.
FADO Go is set out to compete with traditional social platforms, modern cross-border e-commerce platforms and pure blockchain platforms within the global e-commerce landscape. Our competitive positions can be further analyzed as follows:
Traditional cross-border trading
In conventional cross-border international trades, package forwarders and international express carriers are typical types to facilitate trades and fulfill global consumers' demands. Each kind separately provides its services despite the necessity for exhaustive and intensive cooperation to deliver a seamless cross-border shopping experience. There are following common barriers to entry, causing high threats of new entrants and new competitors are able to easily enter into the industry. There is a reduced profit potential as more competitors are in the industry.
International express companies either own different means of transport such as airplanes, containers, cargo ships or just specialize in one of them such as railway transportation or road transportation and take responsibility for transporting goods from one country to another.
Package forwarders consolidate packages and coordinate logistics activities from different international express companies to provide suitable and customized logistics services to different customers.
The customs clearance documentation and procedures for import and export are relatively complicated. A lot of paperwork needs to be prepared such as commercial invoices, Certificate of Origin, Bills of Lading, packing lists, etc. Too many papers make it hectic to prepare them correctly without knowledge in the logistics field. Not to mention, these import/export procedures and regulations for each country vary greatly. In a nutshell, the registration for import/export procedures and door-to-door delivery at international express companies are labor-consuming.
An end-to-end transportation process entails the participation of many international express companies as each company specializes in a particular mode of transport.
Each international express company has an advantage of providing services in certain regions such as Southeast Asia or Africa or North America. Requirements, conditions for consignment, and service prices change from time-to-time and hinder an express company to master logistics procedures in every region around the world.
There needs to be a sender overseas to deliver the package to international express companies since these companies usually do not take responsibility for combining multiple packages in one full container for cross-border delivery.
A location or warehouse overseas must be available to consolidate all of the products global shoppers buy and make them ready for international shipping.
For these above-mentioned reasons, international express companies and package forwarders have been cooperating to provide cross-border shipping solutions. However, their shipping services provided to customers are still flawed due to:
Expensive shipping costs: the package forwarders act as middlemen and charge customers a significant premium (30-50% on the shipping cost) for their service. This markup adds an expensive cost to shipping service fees without adding any value to the logistics process. The money goes straight into greedy pockets of package forwarders, but is not used for paying carriers or speeding up delivery times.
Poor post-shipping service: Both international express companies and package forwarders do not support and follow a standardized process of returning products global shoppers bought in case of damaged goods. These two parties only take care of the shipping process and are done with their duties until packages are shipped. In reality, there are many worst-case scenarios that can happen after the delivery such as damaged or broken goods, the wrong type or category of product delivered, an insufficient quantity of products ordered, etc. This is a major problem for international online shopping as customers have to find out return policies on e-commerce sites, contact sellers, provide evidence and explain the situation with sellers all by themselves. Filing a complaint and returning a product to a seller overseas are interminable and complicated and it’s even more painful for global shoppers without any dedicated support from international express companies and package forwarders.
Bad tracking: Tracking status across the whole process is extremely fractured and not instantly updated. Due to poor tracking, customers are unable to learn about shipping progress and waiting-time until the delivery. Logistics service providers might experience failed package transfers, failed deliveries and lost package shipments because they do not adequately update the package delivery process to notify related parties.
Modern cross-border direct trading with decentralization
FADO Go is built with a modern technology-based international trade method that provides an end-to-end online shopping solution and a simple interface for global shoppers similar to making purchases on domestic e-commerce platforms. We act as a hub to synchronize all services of international express companies and package forwarders by setting a service standard for cross-border e-commerce and establishing in-depth partnerships with these organizations to gain insights into their useful databases. Utilizing valuable data, we build an advanced system with AI, machine learning technology to analyze buying behaviors from each region to suggest suitable choices in real-time for global shoppers. With every shopping need, no matter which area it is from, our system will automatically recommend shipping solutions to optimize costs, guide shoppers throughout documentation and process to be prepared, and estimate exact taxes and other expenses for importing goods.
The application of blockchain technology will take our service quality to a whole new level with new features such as cryptocurrency payment, secured customer information, lower costs for consumers and merchants, borderless P2P payment, anti-fraud security, B2B smart contracts, reliable review, automated and transparent quality control and so much more. However, beyond a pure blockchain-based e-commerce platform which often has limited use cases, FADO Go offers a proven cutting-edge platform which has already generated millions USD in revenues and brings in the best addition as a decentralized platform to create newer, better values to global customers and lower the threat of new entrants for increased profit potential.
By taking a hybrid approach that combines the best practices of cross-border e-commerce platforms with the next generation of social technology, FADO Go is setting ourselves apart from the competition and even a new bar in global e-commerce.
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