In 1995, Jeff Bezos launched a website to sell books. He billed it as “Earth's biggest bookstore,” and went through ideas for names including “Cadabra” and “Relentless.” Eventually, he named it after the largest river in the world.
It turned out to be an apt name. Amazon unleashed an ever-growing, inexorable river of e-commerce. The impact of that flow on transportation and logistics goes far beyond Amazon, and far beyond the delivery drivers who were pounding up your home's front stairs at 11 p.m. the week before Christmas.
The U.S. Commerce Department didn't have holiday sales figures at press time, but it reports that for the third quarter of last year, U.S. retail e-commerce sales were $101.3 billion, up 15.7% from the third quarter of 2015. (That's adjusted for seasonal variation, but not for price changes.)
In contrast, total retail sales for the third quarter were up only 2.2% year over year.
And it's not just consumer goods like clothing and electronics. For instance, Darryl Barber, automotive segment marketing manager for UPS, says e-commerce is changing the way auto parts distributors do business.
“Consumers who are buying a part are as likely to go online and order it as drive to a local store,” he says. “The aftermarket manufacturers we deal with [report] aftermarket business is up 3.5 to 4% year over year, but it's up 16 to 20% for the e-commerce channel.”
For UPS, that means parts previously moving in palletized shipments to a warehouse or distribution center are now going out in more frequent, smaller shipments, Barber says. “A lot of times they end up in the package cars on the street — the same guys that deliver your Christmas presents.”
Much of the most direct impact of e-commerce is on package carriers such as UPS and FedEx. UPS, for instance, projects that business-to-consumer parcels
