Last week was madness! The Stock Market is crashing like crazy! Monday was the worst day for stocks since the financial crisis. Thursday was the worst day for stocks since 1987. Friday was the best day for stocks since 2008. Hard to follow or predict the madness!
While you can’t find any toilet paper across the globe, schools, restaurant, coffees, non-essential stores, everything is shutting down across the globe in order to keep the Covid19 pandemic under control!
This pandemic is going to be the tipping point of Ecommerce growth as people are asked to stay home and everything is closing, brands such as Nike, Apple, Patagonia and others are closing retails stores and directing customers to the e-commerce sites. E-commerce orders are going to explode in the coming days and weeks!
Ikea to sell through third-party for the first time on tmall in China
While most of the iconic brands are trying to keep their relationship with their consumers and prefer to go direct to consumers, in some cases, they chose an alternative path (oftentimes in market where they have no choice in order to compete effectively)! Ikea has finally decided to sell its products on Tmall (Alibaba platform), this is the first time that Ikea agrees to see its products on a 3rd party platform or sellers. This is a concrete example of the strength & dominance that marketplaces have today in some key markets in the globe.
Check out the story HERE.
DoorDash is updating app to allow no-contact deliveries
With the pandemic growing, contactless deliveries implemented in China are becoming the norm in US, Europe and LATAM. The social distancing is absolutely critical to #flattenthecurve and delivery companies are doing their part giving the options of no contact delivery in their delivery options.
THIS is what you need to know about the no-contact deliveries.
DHL will deploy 1,000 robots from Locus Robotics for delivery fulfilment
Based on Transport Intelligence e-commerce global report, Ecommerce logistics cost is 50% fulfilment related & 50% last mile. In March 2012, Amazon bought Kiva and made the initial strong push of Robotic implementation into the warehouses, it has today +200K robots deployed. An important aspect to improve performance, speed, efficiency and match rising consumer expectations is the implementation of advanced technologies in the warehouses fulfilling these products. This is an important announcement & milestones for DHL related to the deployment of 1000 Picking Assistant Locus Locus to support e-commerce businesses!
Check out the details HERE.
Mercado Libre Compro la software factory Argentina Lagash (In Spanish)
Mercado Libre, the leading e-commerce company in LATAM is making a strong push into its technology team! With this announcement, the company is buying the software factory Lagash and bringing onboard more than 350 software developers from multiple major economies in LATAM (Today MELI has already more than 3000 software developers)! Technology is everything today and attracting the right talent will be critical to compete in the next decade in e-commerce dominance!
E-commerce dominance is a thing. Read THIS article to gain some insight.
Walmart is opening a new e-commerce Distribution Center in Mexico (In Spanish).
https://www.milenio.com/negocios/walmart-abre-centro-de-distribucion-en-edomex
Walmart invested 600M Mexican Pesos to enhance its e-commerce service, this is part of a 3 new DC network that Walmart announced in 2020, with increased competition from Mercado Libre & Amazon, Walmart is investing heavily to compete in speed and delivery quality! We can expect to see more of these announcements in the coming months.
StartUp of the Week: Outdoor Voice
In this section, we usually promote and share news of companies which are raising money and being successful but since it’s important to show the reality of the business, I thought it would be good to share the reality and complexity of certain startups.
How Outdoor Voices, a Start-Up Darling Imploded
If you never heard about Outdoor Voices, you are not spending enough time on Instagram, The athletic apparel company was supposed to be the next Lullemoon (at least that’s what investors wanted us to think) but ended up burning cash like crazy and this article shows the complexity of making a Direct To Consumer profitable & sustainable as well as the real challenge of working across generation!
New York Times has published a great report about the company.
Stay home, stay Healthy!
Nabil Malouli is VP, Global E-commerce for DHL Supply Chain where he leads the innovation, strategy and product development of its e-commerce fulfilment and last-mile solutions.
Photo: Locus Robotics