Chongqing- With China's second-biggest shopping festival of mid-year 618 (June 18) approaching, consumers have already prepared to buy products online, while the electronic commerce (e-commerce) firms were busy packing and loading, and the customs officers were carefully reviewing and releasing the goods.

"This year's 618 cross-border e-commerce promotion will experience two sales peaks compared to before," said an official. "From May 31 to June 3, Chongqing Lianglu Guoyuan Port Comprehensive Bonded Zone ushered in the first group of consumers orders, and June 15 to 19 is the second peak of the big promotion." Nine hundred sixty thousand orders are expected to be shipped in the Chongqing Lianglu Guoyuan Port Comprehensive Bonded Zone during the two peak periods of mid-year promotion with an increase of 5% year-on-year.

24/7 customs clearance service

This year's "618" promotion activity is crucial for many e-commerce companies to increase sales, but the explosion of goods brings new challenges to the supply chain. 

In response to the surge of goods, Lianglu Cuntan customs and airport customs have established a "green channel" for quick delivery and release of e-commerce goods, strengthening the round-the-clock customs clearance service, which has solved the actual difficulty of over 200,000 goods backlogs and relieved the stocking pressure. 

Customs clearance facilitation

How to further relieve the firms' burden while reducing customs clearance time and improving customs clearance facilitation? Chongqing Customs District has strengthened the management of the barcode traceability and product quality and safety to implement precise measures for enterprises.

For instance, Lianglu Cuntan customs used the reform pilot measure of bar code declaration of e-commerce commodities to unify the element information that needs to be declared for e-commerce products as standard attributes, which avoids possible distortion caused by multi-link circulation and manual filling in the entire process of the commodity supply chain. At the same time, the customs can trace the source throughout the process and conduct proper supervision through the bar code.

As a user of barcode declaration, a Chongqing company representative said that the automatic matching and intelligent refilling of product barcodes significantly reduce the workload of rechecking specifications and models and avoid human error.

Chongqing's cross-border e-commerce 

As one of the country's first pilot cities for cross-border e-commerce, Chongqing's cross-border e-commerce has ushered in development opportunities despite the epidemic. It has achieved rapid growth with a series of new business measures, like return center warehouses. 

From January to May, Chongqing Lianglu Guoyuan Port Comprehensive Bonded Zone inspected and released 6.436 million imported retail parcels of cross-border e-commerce, with a transaction volume of 1.13 billion yuan (about 169 million U.S. dollars), with an increase of 1.5% and 7.3% year-on-year respectively, statistics show. In May alone, the retail volume was 1.474 million, and the retail value was 260 million yuan, going up 22.5% and 26.2%, respectively.

Since the export business of the business-to-business (B2B), a type of e-commerce, was piloted in Chongqing, the accumulated export value of Chongqing Customs District has exceeded 5 billion yuan (about 750 million U.S. dollars) in just over a year. The national e-commerce goods have been exported to Europe from Chongqing through the China Railway Express with a strong agglomeration effect.

(Wang Lu, as an intern, also contributed to this report.)