From social commerce to a warehouse that already holds the goods

Coupang, the notes write, began in August 2010, when Forward Ventures opened it in Korea as a social-commerce service. It then grew, they say, on the back of its own fulfillment centers and of Rocket Delivery. The comparison they reach for is Amazon: goods are bought in bulk in advance, stored by kind in centers Coupang runs itself, and, when an order comes in, sent out at once on a truck toward a regional center. If a shipment does not go straight to that regional center, it is sorted once at a mega-hub, then sent on. At the regional center the parcels are sorted by the same routes an ordinary courier would use, and a rider delivers them.

Rocket Delivery itself is simply put: in an area where the service runs, an order completed by midnight arrives the next day. The rocket name, they say, is there to press the image of speed. They give a minimum order of 19,800 won. Coupang men, in this account, are riders hired directly by the company, which pays for fuel and for keeping the vehicle.

Sales that climbed, and a deficit that remained

The figures are dated, and they stay in the window the notes give. Sales rose from 2.6846 trillion won in 2017 to 13.3 trillion won in 2020. Operating profit, even so, stayed in the red; they write that the operating loss narrowed from 1.128 trillion won in 2018 to 584.2 billion later in the same stretch. They also note a first-place brand-reputation ranking in the open-market field for shopping apps in 2020, and they claim that a differentiated dawn or same-day service had already brought Rocket Wow to some five million members. Two years after founding, they add, the firm was in the black, and Rocket Delivery was part of the reason. That early-profit claim is left as they write it, not silently aligned with the later deficit figures.

A cheap membership, a dawn van of greens, and a seller’s complaint

Rocket Wow, they write, is a membership at 2,900 won a month: free shipping with no minimum purchase, and free returns within thirty days. Rocket Fresh, launched in 2018, is a dawn delivery of fresh food for Wow members, some 8,500 items, with a minimum order of 15,000 won. The strength of the model, in this telling, is the self-run logistics and the directly hired riders. The weakness is that sellers are left without their customers’ data, and that settlement comes late. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student analysis of Coupang’s Rocket Delivery and fulfillment, with the 2017–2020 sales and deficit figures left as the notes record them.

Last updated: 15 November 2026