E-Commerce in Logistics and Supply Chain Management

E-Commerce in Logistics and Supply Chain Management

Kayikci (2019) founded that the fast progression of the e-commerce has been related to economic development, which has exploited the global market in our economy. It has touted to be a powerful medium of trading in the developed economies representing the latest leader of physical distribution networks and physical SCM. The expansion of e-commerce is still in its beginning to become an integral part of economic life in this kind of shopping experience (Adolf, & Liu, 2014). Technologies in e-commerce have an excellent opportunity to offer high efficiencies and transparency, which conveys significant changes within the supply chain. This provides alternative ways of doing business, thus improving visibility and shift in distribution channels.

According to Kayikci (2019), SCM strategies in e-commerce have improvised technological measure to ensure logistical structures beats that of physical distribution. E-commerce includes its capability to consolidate and track the consignment of customer’s goods while providing order credentials and prominence of online dispatch statements and freight notices of landing using a unified interface of ERP coordination in the business. Therefore, this logistic system consideration from e-commerce ensures transparency with customer transparency in the supply chain, thus improving customer satisfaction. Furthermore, as the online retail nurtures, supplying orders to clients will be much quicker, which will increase the competitive advantage (Adolf, & Liu, 2014). Hence, to coup with the competition, logistics will facilitate encouragement to some retailers to set up arrangements of their local workshops of the network to ship their other faster-moving products to the customers. Therefore, the emerging model of blending e-fulfillment will be around urban logistics facilities where online sales densities are very high.

Kayikci (2019) stated that the e-commerce background is shifting at a steady rate despite it, representing 10% of all leasing in the world. Therefore, companies should anticipate robust and better strategies to manage the challenging situation in their favor. Online platforms have provided the most significant opportunity for any world’s business to grow and expand as many of the physical retailers have turned their ways and started to establish and increase their online presence. This is a positive and challenging step to e-commerce in existence since, e-commerce platform does not only facilitate transactions over the web, but it supports the creation and continuation of the development of an online relationship with the customers.

Zijm & Klumpp (2016) argued that the kind of global economy we are facing today is as a result of diversification and specialization of productions through technologies, which have created trends in modern logistics and supply chain. According to their thought (Zijm & Klumpp, 2016), the inefficiency of social, environmental, and economic terms of the economy has resulted from essential weaknesses of the e-commerce system rendering commerce practices in the long run. Therefore, the future supply chain should no longer deplete scarce natural resources or contribute to any climatic change to the environment. Hence, they should uphill environmental conditions by avoiding pollution, safety, and security threats, thus remaining to be economical and satisfying high labor quality standards (Zijm & Klumpp, 2016). Therefore, for a desirable economy that supports online business, e-commerce should develop insolent business models in logistics and supply chain with new requirement standards and conforming training in realizing intelligence based on supply chain logistics.

Integrated E-Commerce and Its Logistics

The advancement of various shipping opportunities allows retailers to have diversified mechanisms over e-commerce logistics and supply chain (Tran et al., 2013). This, therefore, makes customers have the capability to order anything they want at any time since they have full control over the market from their premises using mobile phones and tablets. Nevertheless, e-commerce has challenged the traditional role of parcel operators by synchronizing and standardizing business processes to achieve real-time access to the insight of inventory movement. However, since the risk of misplaced orders has increased due to the vast number of sales channels, e-commerce businesses have integrated front-end and back-end fulfillment of orders through technologies for the online retails (Adolf & Liu, 2014). This integration of this strategy together with automated software in e-commerce logistics have aligned significant touch-points in a supply chain that have increased efficiency hence helping to identify redundant processes in the business.

The incorporation of e-commerce logistics in the business supports customers interact with retailers across all the independently managed channels through a multi-channel approach in the industry (Adolf, & Liu, 2014). The approach desire to enable customers to interact is, however, drawn back by lacking necessary factors of optimizing customer experience based on different devices. Other than that, the Omni-channel approach is business diligent in ensuring that customers receive the same experience through various channels and devices. Therefore, this approach seems to integrate a company’s software with other systems like ERP, Warehouse Control System (WCS), and distributed order management. In this case, retailers and shoppers are mostly considered for the orders made by the customers since retailers are required to redesign their distribution processes completely and improvise automation of the distribution channel equipment. In addition, shippers are required to have the technology and infrastructural processes that can ensure sufficient response time between when the customer places an order and when the fulfillment of the dispatch is done.

The e-commerce logistic platform is the use of network-based technologies to back up material acquirement in the business, warehousing, and shipping practices in the supply chain (Yu et al., 2016). From their argument (Yu et al., 2016), they explained that the e-commerce logistics is an inter-organized system that connects shipment users and Transport Service Providers (TSP) to collaborate in trading which enables secure distribution to various routes by providing inventory-tracking information. Besides, this system allows online interaction of transport system which facilitates comparison of the transport supply and transport demand to be able to match the shipment capacity if the business that is available (Adolf, & Liu, 2014). The transport demand, supply, and available shipment capacity are provided in the comprehensive system through a robust online solution for online solutions where the TSPs can search them online to match them and increase the load factor of any trip.

According to DHL (2015), an end-to-end composition of fulfilling competencies of a web-based enterprise is used in today’s companies to enable customers to choose their preferred transport option. This is factored into the total cost of the customer product from differentiated business activities provided by e-commerce logistic platforms. From the business activities, the aggregators creates business community where TSPs offers freight capacities with preferred prices of transportation to users on the website (DHL, 2015). Moreover, auction creates a market and reduces empty trips by promoting a load factor on the website whereby the transport users can bid of the TSP’s freights in a real-time auction system. Finally, quotation on the shipment of the customer’s products in exchanges, which provides a stable online market with TSPs trade freights being a fixed set of rules in regularly changing charges.

Generally, (Kayikci & Zsifkovits (2013) characterized e-commerce platform as a community platform with a networked form of transport exchange whereby the user transport and the TSPs integrates to form suitable transport needs and resources from each other. Nevertheless, the e-commerce platform has been denoted by platform strategies, which enables the complete success of e-commerce activities if proper management decisions are made for the implied policies (Hajdul, 2014). In conjunction, e-commerce logistics acts as a platform with the capability to create and manage online storefront to customer users while performing other activities like shopping cat management, personalized transaction management, and product visualization for multiple shipments. Therefore, they form specific competence of the platform communications, which determines the essentiality of the ability of the transport users and TSPs to collaborate within the e-commerce platform (Hajdul, 2014). The integration of these e-commerce logistics are

essentials that offer an excellent opportunity for companies operating in e-commerce activities to refine cooperate strategies of their plans to design business models that can be used to cope with the growing competition in e-business.

Technological Trends in Logistics and Supply Chain Processes