Today, I was checking out the course blog and some of my classmates’ blogs. Amongst, I found Beverley Cheng’s blog post about Amazon.com’s supply chain very interesting. She bought a pair of soccer cleats on Amazon.com and is very excited to its arrival. According to Beverley, “Amazons supply chain is so tightly integrated that customers who order an item know almost immediately how long it should take to ship, how many pieces there will be, and any other relevant information. They rely heavily on their technology, and much less on actual human resources to fulfill any inventory issues”, I do totally agree with her, however, the shipping cost is somehow the largest resistance for customers to click the “confirm order” button. It is because loyal customers of Amazon.com are usually looking for something cheap and fast on Amazon, let’s say a Blackberry phone rubber case. A phone case is usually costing 5 bucks and the shipping cost would be around 1-2 bucks. It is almost half of the price of the phone case itself and customers have to wait for a week for its arrival. So customer would think, “why not I just go to a convenience store right the corner so I don’t have to wait and pay shipping fees!” Therefore, I think Amazon.com and other major online retailers in the market should really come up with a better solution to not scare away customer by the shipping costs and attract more business opportunities.
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