The Material Handling Blog

Festive season 2021 is expected to bring numerous opportunities for retailers and ecommerce companies. The excitement with festive promotional sales offers will create massive online traffic, impact product sales and company turnover, and put enormous pressure on companies’ supply chain processes.

There’s no question that online grocery ordering is here to stay. Access to fresh produce, milk, eggs, toilet paper and many more grocery items isn’t changing. However, the process by which those products get delivered to the consumer from distribution centers – that is being re-envisioned to meet changing consumer demands. And, with that come new challenges, technologies and strategies. Let’s first look back at history.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to force unprecedented shut downs, will the resulting changes to supply chains be temporary anomalies or permanent changes?

Today’s shoppers do not hesitate to send back items that do not meet their expectations. Modernizing the returns process has become a key objective for many retailers.

More and more people, especially young adults, are moving into cities. To reach this increasingly important market segment, retailers need to find a profitable and efficient way to do urban fulfillment.

Never in our lifetimes have we seen such as change in the retail supply chain. The traditional process of regional distribution centers shipping to brick and mortar stores has been significantly altered by online fulfillment from the likes of Amazon.com and an ever-growing list of online retailers.