The last mile and the smashing of the power of centralised distribution

How to do the last mile in the direct to customer supply chain has been bothering people for a while now.  With the rapid growth in online sales, there has been a growing use of the workplace as a delivery point for personal purchases.  Whilst this may be fine for the odd delivery or two, it is obviously unsustainable if everybody is doing it, (it doesn’t scale).

I have always thought that the best person to do the last mile was the customer.  After all we are already used to doing it for our store purchases.  We stop for fuel, pick up food from the local supermarket, go shopping on weekends and carry all the stuff home ourselves.  We are now seeing the fight for commercialisation of the last mile hammering another nail in the coffin of retail stores, playing out as we speak.

Why GST free international sales are not killing local retail

With Amazon.com recently being forced to pay state sales taxes in the USA some people are raising the question again about why GST cannot be levied on overseas based online retailers.  Well, this particular issue is a domestic U.S. problem where state sales taxes vary from one state to another and no international borders are crossed, so the problem is a little simpler to solve. 

We also do not have this issue in Australia.  GST is national and is levied on online purchases from Australian companies. The collection of GST on low value purchases from overseas is said not to be economically viable; however I am sure it could be done by data collection from banks, Paypal and other

The Growing World of Online Supply Chain

Online retail sales were only 5% of all retail sales in 2011 according to NAB  and Australia lags behind the rest of the world, (which is unusual for us). The online retail (and online B2B) market is set to grow rapidly over the next few years and whole new supply chains are going to be established and old ones are going to die (or shrink or adapt) as the traditional retail shop supply chain