Retail, E-commerce and the importance of logistics in the new normal

The current COVID-19 is drawing a clear distinction between winners and losers in retail. Go online big time or go home. Every e-tailer needs to have a great strategy to stay alive and make it through.

              Following could be considered as key strategy components in very simplistic terms

  • Customer reach.
  • Customer interest generation.
  • Customer conversion.
  • Secure Sale
  • Getting the product to the customer.

Reaching customers either through digital platforms such as shopify or own website are super important. Battling the big online e-commerce giants or partnering with them or both will be a key factor in ramping up product sales.

The picture below presents tremendous focus which most retailer players will drive hard online in the days, months to come to ensure that factors such as COVID-19 in the future don’t impact / bankrupt their business.

Taking an example of e-commerce in one geography, say Canada as one case, the objective below is to present customer’s preferences and associated importance when buying online. It may be surprising to see that DELIVERY occurs multiple time as a criterion for consideration when buying online. The actual delivery of the product safely, on-time and in the most cost effective manner has tremendous importance to the customer, in any Geography.

Partnering with multiple logistics partners and building digital bridges/connections to existing and new logistics partners will ensure that, based on the logistics product types(same day,next day etc), retailers can tailor their online solutions to meet Customer Satisfaction criterion and win over the competition.

Its key to have specail offering based on product types, customer categories and places to need to service. Segregating between big local delivery solutions and postal service and new options emerging in logistics can help retailers become competitive e-tailers and succeed in this new normal. Partnering with some airlines offering logistics solutions is also a critical as an additional option to optimize costs and bring in an additional channel. Keep looking.

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