It's no secret — the past few years have been huge for e-commerce. Digital retail surged as pandemic conditions forced shoppers to stay home — seeing 27.6% growth in 2020 and 16.8% in 2021, according to Insider Intelligence. The years since have seen ecommerce stay at its post-2020 levels, even as growth has fallen back to more reasonable amounts.
If your business is among the many conducting more online business than ever before, you need to reconsider your approach to the supply chain to stay competitive. Adapting to the new retail reality should be a high priority.
Rethink and Rebuild Stronger: Solutions for the Modern Supply Chain
What does it really mean to refresh your approach to the supply chain? Optimization is the name of the game. Because you'll be relying more heavily than ever before on freight and shipping partners of all sizes, it's worth adjusting the systems that help you manage these relationships.
Writing for Entrepreneur, Mohamed Elhawary named supply chain optimization as a major 2023 trend and explained that every piece of a company's logistics network can be adjusted. Sourcing and production of goods are eligible for tune-ups, alongside transportation and distribution of merchandise.
When you take a close look at your rate agreements and contract terms with your carriers, you may find room to negotiate for improvements. If inertia has set in over the past few years, it can be surprising just how many opportunities there are to adjust your contracts for better value.
All of this optimization would be incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive to handle manually, hence why it often goes undone. With the right infusion of technology to analyze your supply chain data, however, the answers become clear.
In addition to having the right technology, you should consider working with a third-party negotiator (3PN) such as Zero Down Supply Chain Solutions. These partners provide industry knowledge that complements the technology tools to deliver robust results. 3PNs help balance the scales of knowledge at the negotiating table and have been proven to produce better results than clients negotiating on their own behalf.
Strike Up a Valuable Partnership
Tech tools on their own don't do any good — someone has to be there to analyze and act on the data coming from your shipping performance. Bringing in industry experts to take charge of the optimization process is one way to make sure it gets done, while leaving your own personnel free to keep doing what they do best: earning money for your business.
In an era when e-commerce is taking up an ever-greater portion of the retail world than ever before, you can't afford to let your existing contracts and agreements go unexamined and unoptimized. If you're ready to take action and make changes with a beneficial partnership, contact our experts.
