Order tracking, the new priority for online merchants
Although they can’t receive their orders instantaneously, consumers still expect immediate information on order tracking. As proof, a study carried out last year by MetaPack showed that 83% of the French tend to check the status of their orders at least twice between purchase and reception! Today, e-business leaders are (almost) the only ones able to meet this demand through the systematic tracking of merchandise directly from their site. It is therefore urgent for the others – who don’t belong to this elite and who are still sending their customers to the transporter’s site – to find a way to track the pathway of items ordered. How? By synchronizing data from all the places where orders are prepared and from the transporters. We can expect to see that this total visibility from the merchant site will rapidly become a standard service from online merchants. Even the smallest ones. This is because the cost of the necessary technology has been democratized and customer expectations have grown. In addition, in the context of on-going price wars, not including this type of service means running the risk that your customers will switch to the competition.

Will Uber Rush and Amazon Flex disappoint?
In the immediacy, yes, but not at any cost. This is perhaps the reaction that Uber Rush and Amazon Flex will run into if they develop in France. Their operating principle is simple: subcontract delivery of the last kilometer to part-time workers. But in places where consumers have made service quality a cardinal virtue, this type of arrangement runs the risk of being confronted with the following issues: “Even professionals don’t always do a proper job, so how can we expect amateurs to provide service quality that is at least identical? How can delivery security be guaranteed?”

But I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. The collaborative economy still provides a hotbed of fertile ideas for developing new logistics services with high added value for the customer and optimized prices. The “pallet network” systems proposed by Astre or DB Schenker illustrate this perfectly.