The coronavirus is exposing the limitations of electronic commerce logistics

If this image doesn’t give you an idea of the effects of imposing lockdown on an entire country, few things will: more than 30,000 people having to wait at least an hour to make an online shopping order at Alcampo, one of Spain’s leading hypermarkets.

Alcampo is not an isolated case. It’s the same situation with all the big stores, often leaving customers have little idea about when they will be able to make a purchase. Even the mighty Amazon is now constantly telling users “No delivery windows available” or is removing items from their shopping carts as they become unavailable. If you need to do your shopping these days, you can expect to put together your shopping list, then leave it there in the shopping cart and start trying every hour to see if you can find an open delivery window, and finally, wait to see which of the things you attempted to buy finally make it to your home — needless to say, if you try to buy gloves or a few other well known products, forget it, you are out of luck!

These are systems designed to cope with huge numbers of orders, but that now suddenly find themselves having to deal with entire populations in lockdown trying to shop online. Increasing their ability to meet online orders has its limitations: in a supermarket, the customer does all the work, except for the checkout, and then takes their shopping home.

A facility’s capacity depends on it size and degree of specialization: using the standard facilities of a supermarket and therefore having to use buyers to make up each order, is not the same as using specialized facilities in which the items are moved through hoppers and conveyors. But such highly specialized facilities, as the bankruptcies of Webvan, HomeGrocer or the difficulties of Peapod and other online supermarkets that started in the ’90s clearly remind us, only make sense when certain economics of scale kick in.

Responding to a completely unexpected spike in orders, the result of an event as difficult to predict as a pandemic, is practically impossible, as the hundreds of thousands of people who are trying to make purchases online these days will attest. It’s the same as if thousands of people were trying to enter a supermarket at the same time: the delivery windows are quickly exhausted, stock runs out, and the need to send incomplete or substituted orders arises. Can anyone imagine a queue of more than 30,000 people trying to enter a supermarket?

The only thing we can do under these circumstances is to show understanding, be patient and accept that we are trying to ask systems sized for a limited number of daily orders to be able, overnight and under lockdown, to deal with an avalanche of orders that is impossible to handle, that exceeds the usual load and the existing sizing by several orders of magnitude.

E-commerce is fast becoming essential to supply us safely during a state of emergency and lockdown. But that is one thing, and it’s quite another to expect miracles, as if the resources required could be built overnight. It’s not a question of being up to the task or not, it is that the task is simply beyond our means for the present.

(En espa?ol, aquí)

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