Is Last-Mile Delivery the Pothole in the Road to E-commerce Growth?

摘要

Just as omnichannel strategies are being leveraged by brick and mortar retailers to compete against e-commerce retailers, last-mile delivery may be the uncontrollable pothole that e-commerce retailers will have to fill. Last-mile delivery is less constrained by the complexity of moving goods from a relatively few high-volume locations to many consumer consumption-of-one locations. (There are more than 250,000 manufacturing firms in the US, nearly 4 million retail stores and more than 125 million house-holds in the US) Rather, it's the volume and increasing physical distribution costs. During peaks, many parcel carriers lease vehicles short term to keep up with the temporary volume. But, what happens when holiday volume becomes every day volume as the percent of e-commerce sales grows?