01.06.21
COVID brought a spike in e-commerce annual growth. The challenge now is to manage that explosion in the near term without over investing before the new normal, because we aren’t going back.
by Gary Forger
Everybody knew it was coming. No one knew exactly when. Until it arrived. All at once.
The “it,” of course, is explosive growth in e-commerce sales. And the “all at once” was the second quarter of 2020.
That’s when e-commerce sales soared 44.5% compared to the second quarter of 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Not the 14% to16% expected for the year, which is anything but casual growth. And that accelerated pace fell off just 1% in the third quarter.
“How does any DC absorb that?” asks Dan Gilmore, vice president of marketing for Softeon. That, unfortunately, is not a rhetorical question. And the immediate answer is not easily, and certainly not gracefully. Worse yet, it was just a prelude of what was to come.
Source: Supply Chain Management Review
