Global trade is growing and changing; e-commerce has transformed opportunities for small businesses, the lifeblood of all economies, and is driving developments in infrastructure, capacity, business models, and logistics.

Within the global air cargo ecosystem, courier is the most obvious candidate for meeting the demands e-commerce has generated; it supports the efficient and cost-effective transport of large numbers of small, individual packages.

Whether by happy accident or clever forethought, courier and e-commerce are a match made in heaven, or at least in the skies.

There are of course alternative modes of transport for e-commerce goods, but structural and commercial issues make these less attractive.

Given the volumes of shipments involved, security is a key issue for couriers. A recently introduced system at Heathrow Airport, based on improved data sharing and cross-agency cooperation, is designed to better target Border Force inspections.

What is courier?

Courier is, in simple terms, an unaccompanied baggage product. Historically, it started with a courier purchasing a ticket and taking their packages as excess baggage, collecting them from baggage terminals at their destination airport.

Airlines then put their own courier on the plane and sold their baggage allowance. Shortly after, the airlines stopped putting a courier on the plane and just sold the unaccompanied baggage product – known today as courier.

Like passenger baggage there are significant restrictions on what can travel as courier; no dangerous goods; no batteries of any kind, even simple alkaline batteries; no liquids; no knives, to name but an obvious few.

Not all airlines offer a courier product and those that do can offer it in different ways, with different service features. In this way it continues to be much closer to a passenger baggage experience than a cargo product.

The courier experience – unaccompanied baggage experience – enables a small community of generally express courier companies to offer services that can be faster and more cost-effective than integrator solutions.

They can also be more quickly adapted to address specific, local market dynamics – for example, supporting the Indian diaspora community in the UK with shipments from family back home.

A different world

The global ecommerce market is simply vast; according to an analysis by ECDB, global revenue in 2025 will hit US$5 trillion, 70 percent of which is accounted for by the US and China.

The UK is the world’s third largest ecommerce market. Consumers can shop anytime, from anywhere, using virtually any device, in the same way that businesses can order raw materials, components, and finished goods.

This extraordinary expansion of access, convenience and underlying infrastructure has created a near-insatiable demand, the impacts of which have been felt in every corner of the globe. Online platforms have proliferated, and the underpinning transportation and logistics networks, and supply chain infrastructure, have developed in step.

And it’s a demand that’s still growing; cross-border e-commerce sales, according to Statista, will reach almost US$8 trillion by 2030, up from US$785 billion in 2021.

Whilst consumers look for choice, value and quality, manufacturers have become utterly dependent upon components and raw materials sourced from across the globe, often driven ‘just-in-time’ to make their products; the global B2B ecommerce market was worth US$20.4 trillion in 2022, over 5 times that of the B2C market, again according to Statista.

The airline industry is the backbone of the ecommerce ecosystem – IATA says 80 percent of e-commerce goods by value travel by air.

An inspector calls

Heathrow Airport processes almost three quarters of all UK air cargo, with an annual value of well over £200 billion. Cargo in and out of Heathrow is more than the sum of all other UK airports cargo shipments taken together.

For incoming courier shipments at Heathrow, a new system has recently been introduced that automates and simplifies manifest information sharing with Border Force and other parties, including HMRC, meaning less disruption and more targeted inspections.

The new system helps stop suspect packages at the border. It enhances data sharing with HMRC, in line with their long-term objectives, and works alongside existing systems and processes to create an even more safe and secure environment for courier product.

It uses manifest information, provided by importers and shared with Border Force, to compute a risk factor for all individual packages in incoming shipments, such that only those assessed as suspect need be investigated.

Conclusions

Courier has flourished as a result of the boom in global e-commerce; or, to put it another way, e-commerce has flourished as a result of the existence of courier.

Either way, the courier ecosystem that underpins online shopping and business operations is now so extensive and efficient that it is difficult to see how it could be replaced, indeed it is now so firmly embedded as the transport mode of choice for e-commerce that customers rarely look elsewhere.

Two independently developed systems or processes can end up being co-dependent, as has happened here, but the level of interdependency in this case is extremely high – and the result is that both now co-develop to mutually enhance the online trading experience.
Long may that continue.