Is E-commerce Creating a More Efficient and Effective Logistics Industry? Electronic commerce has revolutionized not only the way goods are sold, but how they are delivered. Customers demand products delivered at very high speed with complete order flexibility and convenience. Moreover, today’s online customers want to be able to track their order instantly, from the moment they place an order until the moment they receive it at their doorstep. With all new technologies customers became smarter. They want to be able to re-route shipments, determine delivery costs and time in transit, and break up their orders for multiple shipments to different addresses. All this implies that the shift of the power from the seller to the buyer has created a new era of expectations, and buyers—whether they are consumers or businesses won’t tolerate bad experiences such as partial shipment of goods, poor product return policies or timely back orders.The most common form of logistics has traditionally been based on moving large shipments of items in bulk to select strategic customers in a few geographic locations. Shipments have been tracked by container, pallet, or other unit of bulk measurement, not by individual item or parcel. Manufacturers have backed up their trucks to loading docks at retail stores or distribution facilities, relying on those entities to deliver the goods through the final links of the supply chain to individual customer. Often the various links of the supply chain have had limited visibility into the operations of one another. The capability for end-to-end visibility of a package from manufacturer to customer has been virtually nonexistent in a traditional logistics environment.With the beginning of electronic commerce traditional logistics has been radically transformed. Electronic commerce is demanding an active, high speed, approach to logistics. The typical electronic commerce customer is unknown entity who...
