The E-Commerce Fulfillment Challenge For Growing Retailers: Automation For The Other 90 Percent

By Beth Ann Ferner, OPEX Material Handling

A problem that almost all e-commerce retailers are grappling with these days is how to adapt fulfillment requirements to meet the exponential growth of online ordering.  Online purchasing in the United States is growing by more than 17 percent annually, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, with $193 billion in retail sales for the first three quarters of 2013.  E-commerce orders accounted for 7 percent of total U.S. retail sales in 2012.  By 2017, continued double-digit annual e-commerce growth is expected to reach 10 percent of total retail sales in the U.S., according to market analysts, Forrester Research.  Interestingly, 80 percent of this revenue is coming from only about 10 percent of all e-commerce players.  Amazon alone chalked up $49 billion in sales during the first three quarters of 2013 – 25 percent of all e-commerce sales in the U.S. during this period – followed by other big online players like Walmart, Apple and Dell.  For e-commerce retailers, the challenge of handling their Internet fulfillment lies with predicting what their order volume will be in three, five or even ten years out. 

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