A hallowed tradition on college campuses everywhere is the CARE package from home, full of mother’s freshly baked cookies, warm sweaters and, for the unserious young scholar, perhaps a copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. In China, though, there’s a problem with this parcel-related ritual. Outside many campuses it’s common to see lines of delivery trucks and tricycles idling near the front gates, waiting for students to come out and pick up their goody boxes. Couriers, you see, are not allowed to enter the grounds, and the schools themselves have no provisions for delivery.
To help clear the bottleneck, Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com, the giant online marketplaces owned by Alibaba Group, are working with 11 Chinese universities and colleges to set up “Alibaba service centers” to receive and dispatch packages for the student body. Set to open later this month, the centers will feature an automated system so that students–who tend to be very active online shoppers–will be notified when their packages arrive. Recipients can also check delivery status through the centers. In addition to deliveries from Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com, the centers will also handle packages from other shopping websites (although it appears they will not handle packages from mom and dad).
The campus centers are another small step in the development of China’s dodgy parcel-deliverynetworks. The country’s largest online shopping platforms have been investing millions of yuan in warehouses, trucks and sophisticated logistics systems to improve delivery times and spread their reach nationwide. In May 2012, Tmall.com teamed up with nine major domestic logistics firms to establish standards for the fragmented, highly regional industry.
Tmall officials said they are working to establish more delivery centers on universities and colleges in China. The first schools in the program, located in eight provinces, are:
Xi’an Eurasia University
Hubei University of Economics
Hangzhou Normal University Alibaba Business School
Sichuan Huaxin Modern Vocational College
College of Mobile Telecommunications, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecom
Zhejiang Shuren University
Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics
Wuhan Commercial Service College
Hubei Finance & Taxation College
Xiangtan University
Henan University of Science and Technology
