IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/topchp/978-3-030-34532-7_14.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

“Gravity” and the Packaging of B2C Cross-Border Ecommerce

In: The Changing Postal Environment

Author

Listed:
  • Tim Walsh

    (Independent Postal and Ecommerce Consultant)

Abstract

World trade in physical goods increased 7.7%, from $18.1 to $19.5 trillion between 2012 and 2018. Cross-border business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce trade stands at an estimated $500 bn and grew by 224% in volume over the same period, the fastest-growing segment in world trade. The individualization of trade through ecommerce promises increased consumer welfare through greater choice, better prices, and enhanced efficiency. However, the packaging of trade in an estimated 2.87 billion annually of unique, small, lightweight, and low-value packets, arriving one-by-one, is testing inbound sorting and delivery networks and challenging extant logistic and trade rules designed for a previous, less connected age of traditional trade flows.

Suggested Citation

  • Tim Walsh, 2020. "“Gravity” and the Packaging of B2C Cross-Border Ecommerce," Topics in Regulatory Economics and Policy, in: Pier Luigi Parcu & Timothy J. Brennan & Victor Glass (ed.), The Changing Postal Environment, pages 183-195, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:topchp:978-3-030-34532-7_14
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-34532-7_14
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:topchp:978-3-030-34532-7_14. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.