E-commerce
Supply chain woes not easing for retailers
November 23, 2021
The ongoing supply chain issues remain daunting for retailers with just under six weeks left in the holiday shopping season.
More than half, 65%, of leading online retailers are dealing with off-schedule price increases and 34% have shipping volume capped at this point, according to a LaserShip study.
Retailers are undertaking various strategies to offset the challenges, including buy online, pick up in-store, but retailers using BOPIS are still struggling to combat rising rates and capacity constraints, according to a press release on the study's findings.
LaserShip commissioned the study with Hanover Research to survey over 100 C-Suite, VP and director level supply chain professionals at large retailers.
Key insights include:
- Shipping rates are rising faster than they have in a decade. The shift to e-commerce has also led to an overwhelming capacity crunch, resulting in hundreds of millions of packages being capped annually.
- Eighty-seven percent of retailers have already implemented BOPIS and click and collect but retailers have found that it is not enough to offset capacity issues and rising rates. Retailers are also experiencing a new set of challenges created by BOPIS and those surveyed expressed numerous concerns, including lack of store availability (57%), strained capacity (56%), staff challenges (54%), and other issues largely stemming from the physical stores themselves.
- Forty-nine percent of retailers have concerns about meeting consumers' expectations of faster delivery. Sixty-one percent of retailers surveyed indicated that offering faster shipping options is their primary differentiating strategy to stay ahead of the competition.
- Fifty-nine percent of retailers plan to maintain or allocate more volume to regional carriers.
"As the shift to e-commerce continues to accelerate, retailers need to leverage different solutions to overcome the new challenges they are facing to meet consumers' expectations and drive growth," Josh Dineen, chief commercial officer of LaserShip, said in the release. "This study provides retailers with actionable recommendations on how to build supply chains that create a sustainable competitive advantage. Retailers that can provide faster, reliable home delivery and diversify their carrier mix to ensure capacity and flexibility will gain an unfair share of the growing e-commerce market and build brand loyalty and customer lifetime value."
