Recently, the Intermediate People's Court of Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province concluded the first case of damage liability dispute caused by "lost items" in overseas warehouses. It legally ruled that a logistics company operating overseas warehouse business should compensate a cross

2024-11-12 10:51:04 entertainment 2616℃

Recently, the Intermediate People's Court of Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province concluded the first case of damage liability dispute caused by "lost parts" in overseas warehouses. It legally ruled that a logistics company operating overseas warehouse business should compensate a cross-border e-commerce enterprise for more than 40,000 yuan in losses.

"The so-called overseas warehouses, as the name suggests, are warehouses located overseas. The purpose is to achieve localized services for cross-border sales of goods. The greatest value lies in compressing the transportation cycle." According to the handling judge, overseas warehouses have responded to the booming cross-border trade. In addition to warehousing, its service scope also covers collection, disassembly, packaging, mailing and other logistics forms.

In this case, the plaintiff Jiangnan Company and the defendant Feiya Company are both local Chinese companies (both are pseudonyms). The former is engaged in cross-border e-commerce trade and mainly sells silk products on the German Amazon platform. According to market practice, sellers are required to first put a certain amount of stock into the Amazon warehouse where they are sold, so Jiangnan Company put a batch of silk pillowcases into Amazon's German warehouse in 2020. By 2021, this batch of pillowcases was removed from the platform for various reasons. However, Amazon does not provide cross-border return services for removed products, and sellers are required to provide a delivery address in Germany to receive returned goods.

At this time, in order to achieve localization services for cross-border sales of goods, the demand for overseas warehouses emerged. Feiya Company is an international logistics and transportation company that can provide overseas warehouse services in Germany. Jiangnan Company then entrusted Feiya Company to receive and transport 1,936 returned pillowcases.

However, Feiya Company itself did not build a warehouse in Germany, so it entrusted a local German company to receive and transship this batch of goods for Jiangnan Company. In the end, Jiangnan Company only received 1,355 returned goods, so it sued Feiya Company for compensation of more than 70,000 yuan in various losses caused by the loss of 581 goods.

"We have not entered into a written contract for the overseas warehouse business involved in the case, and this business was entrusted to a local German company." Feiya Company believes that Jiangnan Company should not claim rights against it, but should claim rights from the German company. Claim rights.

Suzhou Intermediate Court held that, first of all, the contractual relationship between the parties should be accurately defined. In this case, Feiya Company sent a quotation for overseas warehouse services to Jiangnan Company in its own name, and only the staff of Feiya Company negotiated and communicated with Jiangnan Company during the whole process. There was no outsider, the German company, so the two parties should be identified. A contractual relationship was established for overseas warehouse services. As for whether Feiya Company entrusted a party outside the case to provide services, it will not affect the determination of the counterparty to the contract in this case.

Secondly, the preponderance of evidence rule should be determined. What is more difficult in this case is proving the fact that the items were lost in the overseas warehouse. However, the plaintiff company does not directly deliver goods to overseas warehouses. Instead, it entrusts Amazon to return the goods stored in the platform warehouse to overseas warehouses, where they are then re-sorted and packaged before being shipped back to China. During the lawsuit, the plaintiff provided the mailing order numbers of 1,936 goods sent by the platform to overseas warehouses. The court carefully sorted out the emails signed for the goods and the logistics receipt records of some mailing orders one by one. These evidences can corroborate each other, reaching a preponderance of evidence. To the extent that AFIA was unable to provide rebuttal evidence, the court recognized the fact that 581 pieces of goods were lost in overseas warehouses.

Finally, the interests of both parties should be properly weighed. Because the evidence provided by Jiangnan Company such as the statement of the outsider and the re-issuance of invoices were not enough to prove the actual value of the lost goods, combined with the reasonable value of the subject matter silk pillowcase and the depreciation and other factors that had been backlogged in the warehouse for more than a year, the damages were determined. When taking responsibility, the court comprehensively considered the loss of goods to be more than 55,000 yuan. After offsetting the freight of more than 12,000 yuan that Jiangnan Company should have paid, the verdict was awarded to Afro-Asia Company for compensation of more than 43,000 yuan. After the verdict, both parties accepted the verdict and settled the lawsuit.

The judge said

Cross-border e-commerce needs to pay attention to risk avoidance

With the rapid development of cross-border e-commerce, the Internet has effectively solved the problem of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, but logistics issues still need to be handled offline. In cross-border e-commerce, sellers cannot provide localized services and cannot compete with their overseas counterparts. Overseas warehouses have emerged to provide localized services for cross-border sales of goods. Based on the functions of overseas warehouses, the services such as collection, warehousing, disassembly, sorting, packaging, and labeling are not performed within the country. If there are defects in the performance of the contract such as missing items in the overseas warehouse, evidence collection will be required. This is a difficult situation, which is why incidents of "lost parts" or even "contract transfers" in overseas warehouses are common in the news, but are relatively rare in judicial proceedings.

Providing "localized services" in overseas markets is the core competitiveness of cross-border e-commerce. Only by rationally configuring and using overseas warehouses can help cross-border e-commerce develop steadily and sustainably. The judgment of this case can lead to observations from three dimensions: First, local governments should focus on supporting leading local companies to establish public overseas warehouses. Through the construction of public overseas warehouses, we can avoid the disorder and inefficiency of repeated investment, break through the bottlenecks of small and medium-sized trading enterprises, and integrate superior resources to focus on the functions of overseas warehouses in customs clearance, taxation and territorial compliance. Second, local logistics companies must choose partners carefully when doing overseas warehouse business. Logistics companies have convenient resources to connect upstream and downstream needs, but they often cooperate with overseas warehouse companies when doing overseas warehouse business. They should choose local overseas warehouses with brand and scale advantages for cooperation as much as possible. Third, small and medium-sized e-commerce companies can give priority to Chinese companies or Chinese agents to carry out overseas warehouse business.

Taking this case as an example, a large part of the reason why Jiangnan Company was able to successfully defend its rights was due to its choice of transaction objects. It is a Chinese enterprise and can litigate in Chinese courts. Generally, the amount of losses involved in overseas warehouse business will not be particularly large. However, if the facts occur overseas and the counterparty to the contract is also an overseas enterprise, and it is necessary to safeguard rights overseas, many enterprises will choose to give up. , so cross-border e-commerce companies should avoid risks as much as possible in arranging logistics and service contracts.