Unique Robotics-Based Goods-to-Person Automation Provides Growing E-commerce Retailers The Flexibility To Expand

By Jim McMahon
Used with permission from OPEX

Many smaller online retailers are faced with the challenge of scaling up the efficiency of their picking operations to successfully compete against big online players. 

Until recently, these e-businesses were forced to purchase expensive, complex systems for what they could only project they might need well into the future.  The latest highly scalable and cost-efficient robotics-based goods-to-person automation, however, provides an ideal solution for these growing e-commerce fulfillment centers.

A problem that almost all e-commerce retailers are grappling with 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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