e-tailing Update 2019: State of the market

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the November 2019 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

November 2019

We hear a lot about emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics. We hear less about one of the enabling technologies that makes the others possible:

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This represents my fourth e-tailing update about the evolution of consumer e-commerce, however, it is my seventh Insights on the topic overall. The series has chronicled the evolution of e-tailing from the eyes of a supply chain analyst. It has focused on the fight between heavyweights brick-and-mortar Walmart and e-tailer Amazon, as a reflection of what has been happening in the consumer retail industry.

A supply chain history

I’ve followed Amazon since the mid-1990s. Back then, I heard whimsical radio ads by Amazon stating that it was looking for a one million square-foot warehouse to store all the stuff it was going to sell on the Internet. The ads were meant to position the aspirant to become the Walmart of the Internet. Once Amazon proved that e-tailing was a huge opportunity beyond books, the brick-and mortar retailers entered the fray. It has been a steeper learning curve for them vis-à-vis Amazon, filled with fits and starts.

In my view, Amazon has been so successful because it recognized early on that on-line fulfillment needed to be its forte. It mastered the logistics of unit-based pick, pack and ship operations, in contrast to Walmart’s expertise in pallet-based pick, pack and ship supply chains. Equally as important, it also mastered distributed order management (DOM). This has allowed Amazon to successfully ship products from its own warehouses, as well as via “drop-ship” delivery from third-party suppliers. It is these capabilities that helped to form the basis for its most successful and lucrative business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), now supporting third-party e-tailing operations. In essence, AWS has made Amazon.com the de facto platform for a large swatch of the e-retail market.

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