E-commerce industry is flourishing on account of its ability to offer exciting opportunities to sell products online. Internet is another reason to drive the e-commerce industry. With this great combination of internet and e-commerce, consumers are able to shop for products anytime and at any place. With all this momentum, every day new platforms are being launched to offer online services, thus expanding the size of e-commerce market.
As the e-commerce market is growing, it is forcing both sellers and supply chain management companies to redefine their strategies and process. This is because, with growing competition, e-commerce is pressurizing the supply chain management to deliver product package sooner than ever. However, this has led supply change management companies to revamp their logistics model and become more flexible.
Moving ahead, proliferation of e-commerce has given a push for free shipping and same day delivery services resulting into creating increased complexities for supply chain management industry. Supply chain industry will have to adapt and become faster and flexible to meet the demands of e-commerce. Amazon Prime is one of the trend-setter that is revolutionizing the way supply chains operate.
To fulfill the demands of e-commerce, supply chains are developing smaller facilities at nearest locations. They are also focusing on building urban warehouses facilities to allow the retailers to store their inventories of higher capacities covering an entire geographical region. This can help to deliver products to the consumers quickly as the warehouse is centrally located, that is only at a distance of an hour away from the consumers’ location.
Another way to overcome the complexities in managing the logistics is utilizing cloud technology. Cloud can enable e-commerce companies to track movement of products that are to be delivered. It helps to bridge the gap between e-commerce companies and supply chain by providing enough control and management. Cloud is a great tool that can eliminate the communication gap and can connect all broken links to deliver the products in timely manner without adding much of an overload on logistics system.
Once the supply chain industry moves to cloud, distance will no longer be considered as a barrier. Resources will be able to communicate and track the delivery status. At the same time, investment in large warehouses for inventories and centralized systems will not be a routine affair owing to capabilities of cloud technology.
