Why E-Commerce Depends on Commercial Trucks
Pretty much everyone purchases goods and services online nowadays. A few short years ago, it was a big deal to order a simple book from Amazon.com; fast forward to today where you can order everything from clothes to groceries straight to your door. How that is able to happen isn’t an important detail for most people, but the fact is without commercial trucks, the e-commerce world wouldn’t be nearly as successful and efficient as it is today.
The fancy word is “logistics management” and it basically refers to the network involved in getting a product from a factory to your home quickly and efficiently. And that network touches a lot of people and locations. Commercial trucks, and the people who drive and maintain them make up a huge part of this network.
“The global logistics industry is vast, both in terms of market size and the huge numbers of people employed in the sector. It is therefore surprising that its role in the development of the global economy is generally overlooked,” - Transport Intelligence CEO, Professor John Manners-Bell
Why Commercial Trucks Are So Important
Commercial trucks come in a wide range of sizes and capabilities, which is incredibly important to ensuring logistic management works properly. A large tractor-trailer will often be responsible for transporting goods and products from a factory to a container ship if the product is coming from overseas, or to a regional hub. Many retailers have hubs where products and goods are shipped in bulk. The bulk goods are then sorted and put on other tractor-trailers or smaller commercial delivery trucks to be brought to stores in the suburbs and urban centres. Once you order a product online, the retailer may have product delivered to your door using their own delivery trucks (think furniture stores), or they will have products shipped from a hub or retail store using Purolator, DHL, UPS, FedEx, or another delivery company (this is referred to as “last-mile"). And all of those companies use various sizes of commercials trucks to get products to their final destination. In short, without trucks, the network simply wouldn’t work or even exist.
Challenges
Ensuring an ever-changing, worldwide network of logistics is functioning properly isn’t easy. The trucks that deliver products and goods to customers are smaller than the trucks that get the products to the store or hub. Since these smaller trucks cannot haul as much as the larger trucks, more are needed to deliver goods on-time during the busy holiday seasons. When demand goes down during slow times, many of the smaller trucks may not be needed for the slower times and sit empty.
“E-commerce freight is causing strains on last-mile capacity. Uneven shipping patterns are playing havoc with freight forecasts. Inventory-to-sales ratios are falling as manufacturers abhor keeping excess inventory for very long...” - CanTruck.ca
Purchasing goods and services online is becoming nothing but more popular, so commercial trucks will likely become more and more important to logistics management over the next few years. While the network grows, commercial trucks and the companies that manufacture them will have to adapt to the needs of the network and the consumer.
