Mr. Nguyen Duy Toan, Director of Proship Company
Delivery costs plummet after a decade
Speaking at the Forum on Applications of E-commerce and Digital Technology in Vietnam in 2025 on September 5th, Mr. Nguyen Duy Toan, Director of Proship Company, shared that to reduce logistics costs, a synchronized operation of the entire market and the participation of all enterprises is necessary.
In 2015, when this unit carried out an e-commerce order in Ho Chi Minh City, the intra-city delivery fee was already VND 25,000. Currently, e-commerce platforms such as TikTok and Shopee are only about VND 14,000, a significant decrease despite rising living costs. This is a positive signal for the economy.
Mr. Toan also said that e-commerce is growing by 20-30% every year, and logistics must keep up. When there is more cargo, infrastructure is invested, cargo vehicles are fuller, and costs per order will decrease.
“Before, a shipper had to spend an additional VND 7,000-8,000 per delivery; now they only need to go to one building, gather orders and call customers downstairs to receive them, reducing costs. The larger the volume of goods, the more optimized the cost,” he illustrated.
Shipping costs to the US and China are also cheaper
Regarding international e-commerce, the Director of Proship said that logistics is a value chain including: raw materials, production, organization, distribution, transportation, customs… so each stage must be optimized with technology and have solutions suitable for each industry.
Mr. Toan illustrated that a Vietnamese enterprise exporting wood to the US via Amazon used to have to export directly to Long Beach (California, USA) and then rent a warehouse and labor in the US, which was very expensive. When advised to transfer some stages back to Vietnam, the cost of warehouse and labor rental was reduced by more than half. If it costs $1 in the US to stick a product label, it only costs about VND 3,000-4,000 in Vietnam.
In addition, the company uses the Cai Mep bonded warehouse instead of the warehouse in Ho Chi Minh City or Binh Duong. Cai Mep has low costs, is close to the deep-water port, convenient for mother ships, helping to reduce costs and shorten the time.
“Just optimizing a few small stages like this has significantly reduced costs and increased the competitiveness of Vietnamese goods in the US,” he said.
Similarly, when shipping to China by rail combined with road. The network from Song Than (Ho Chi Minh City) to Lang Son, Lao Cai connects to China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Europe. For customers in western China, going by rail is more advantageous than by sea or road. Enterprises need to know how to choose the appropriate method for each period, requiring a logistics team with sufficient capacity and consulting partners with the right solutions.
Proship representative said that they are supporting Vietnamese furniture enterprises to export through Amazon. In the past, when selling on Amazon, enterprises often only created an account, and then hired a courier service – mostly from China – to take care of the whole transportation process. This method makes the cost very high.
The reason is that products sold on Amazon must pay import taxes into the US. Vietnamese enterprises do not have legal entities in the US, so they have to ask an import unit in the US to represent and pay taxes, and then they can put the goods in Amazon’s warehouse. This means that small and medium enterprises often have to depend on intermediaries.
However, the US has changed its policy: no longer exempting taxes for goods below $800 (de minimis duty fee). Small retailers cannot use express delivery services as before, but must import officially, make customs declarations, and have full shipping bills. The procedure is much more complicated, leading to increased costs and time.
To solve this problem, Propship said it has built a 30,000 m2 warehouse in Cai Mep. This warehouse collects furniture from many enterprises, then makes separate declarations for each unit but transports them together in one container to the US. Thanks to that, the cost is optimized. Next, this unit also supports the delivery of goods into the system of more than 200 Amazon warehouses in the US, choosing the most suitable warehouse for the transportation route and reasonable cost.
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