Why is E-Commerce unable to deliver on time?

“I didn’t think I would ever say this. Paradoxically, we are trying to slow down our online business,” said the Director of a specialised retailer. From Europe to the U.S., Global Retail News heard the same astonishing opinion from retailers in the gardening, toys, sporting goods and D.I.Y. sectors. For these businesses, the reason is clear. Online sales are won at a cost rather than revenue. No retailers would increase volumes if this means increased financial losses.

Brutal acceleration of online demand

Customers made a clear choice for e-commerce, but the situation was very different for retailers. Traditional retailers knew for some time that demand for e-commerce was growing, but did not anticipate such consequences from an unprecedented demand:
increased traffic, risk of server congestion (simultaneous orders), creation of digital queues on their sites (as for Black Friday), etc.

“We are now in the 4th week of lockdown. Order volumes are insane”, explained Romain Roy, Managing Director of Greenweez (Carrefour), a pure player of organic products with a turnover in 2017 that reached €35 million (the Group has not released any other figures). These are more than double that of the same period last year… and we have taken a number of measures to carefully control our capacity to deliver. The customer now cannot buy more than 30 kilos and we do not deliver for orders of less than €39. Without these limits, we would record an even.