Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Eugene Laney, Head of International Trade Affairs at DHL Express (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Essentially, what you’re saying is, there could be another third-party logistics provider involved that is handling all the fulfillment and inventory. You do the shipping part. At the same time, you still work directly with the website owners and not with the fulfillment players.

Eugene Laney: Depending on the needs of the customer, it can change. Even with large corporations, they may have a variety of providers based on their products.

Sramana Mitra: We’re talking about small merchants.

Eugene Laney: What I’m saying is the model is still the same. It doesn’t really change. You sit and figure out who can give you the best service and also who can meet your current needs.

Sramana Mitra: The reason I’m probing this topic is that we are seeing a very distinct trend right now of zero logistics e-commerce merchants. Lots of people are setting up e-commerce stores of various kinds. All kinds of things. People are buying and selling all kinds of things through the internet these days. A lot of sizeable businesses are being built on this principle of zero logistics e-commerce. For that model to work, you need somebody who’s capable of predictably, efficiently, reliably handling inventory and fulfillment and then somebody else who’s capable of reliably handling the shipping.

Eugene Laney: That’s one business approach. In the beginning, I said there were a number of different ways that people approach this. If you approach this as an intermediary, whether it’s eBay or Amazon, you may ask them to do fulfillment, but all that depends on what sort of demand you have. If you are selling a product where you’re only going 30 transactions per day, then you don’t need a huge warehouse. If you’re doing 600 to 2,000 a day, then of course, you need greater services where you would look for someone to help with fulfillment and all the other services that you described before.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Eugene Laney, Head of International Trade Affairs at DHL Express
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