Order Fulfillment

The COVID-19 pandemic created a major spike in outsourced delivery services as restaurants, grocery stores and retailers rushed to adapt to an overnight shift in consumer behavior. Months later it has become clear that the home delivery shift is here to stay, and the high fees and unpredictability of outsourced services are no longer tenable.…

Many companies are now wondering about the long-term impact of coronavirus on the retail and e-commerce industry, and what lasting changes it may leave. Despite the doom mongering, many brick-and-mortar stores are doing very nicely online, and so are smaller e-commerce players, with average e-commerce businesses reporting a 15 percent increase in annual revenue since…

Amazon.com dominates the e-commerce arena with a market share of nearly 40 percent. However, despite its ever-strengthening grip on the digital world of retail, the e-commerce giant has made efforts to build a brick-and-mortar presence in the past few years — uncharacteristic of other retailers. Amazon has made highly publicized efforts to establish physical stores in…

The zeitgeist of 2020 retail commerce can be summarized in two words: survival mode. COVID-19 kept shoppers at home, away from brick-and-mortar stores, and encouraged many consumers to order online for the first time, adding their purchases to the already increased activity of users already confident in digital transactions. The pandemic increased e-commerce sales 44…

Faced with rising COVID-19 case numbers across the country, many consumers planned to visit fewer retail stores this past holiday season than any year on record. As a result, online and contactless shopping experiences — e.g., buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS), curbside, and delivery services — have become the new normal. Ten months into…

Lots of design literature has been written to document e-commerce shopping best practices. User experience (UX) and user interface strategies, like checkout flows or microcopy, matter for increasing purchases. The role operations can play with improving conversion and revenue is often ignored because of its multiple levels of difficulty. Unlike a button, whose color can…

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned retail upside down. Pre-coronavirus, digital commerce was already outpacing overall retail growth. Services such as buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) were steadily increasing, but aside from grocery and select big-box retailers, curbside pickup wasn't even on the long-term road map for most retailers. Today, BOPIS and curbside pickup have…

Amazon.com is easing third-party seller delivery requirements, CNBC reported. This is due to ongoing constraints on major shipping carriers as a result of the coronavirus. The e-commerce giant announced in August that starting in February 2021, members of Amazon's Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP) program would be required to make deliveries on Saturdays, and meet one- and…

Best Buy is bolstering its delivery options with just a few weeks left in the holiday shopping season. The Richfield, Minnesota-based retailer has for years used its stores as de facto warehouses for its e-commerce business; it's one of the ways Best Buy has held its ground against rivals like Amazon.com. Now it's taking the…

Several Amazon.com sellers are concerned over a recent policy change, CNBC reported. The policy is meant to help the e-commerce giant save space in its warehouses as it faces a pandemic-fueled surge in online orders alongside the usual peak holiday shopping season. In August, Amazon announced it would be enforcing stricter quantity limits on shipments from…