Regardless of what industry you may be in or, even if you are a customer reading this article out of pure interest, it’s important to understand some of the challenges that the modern-day business faces in terms of logistics. Rising costs and things like free delivery and, free returns make it even easier for people to affect a company’s bottom line which can mean, increased product prices;
Think before you return
In an effort to keep up with an ever changing, competitive world of supply and demand, you will notice that very few companies actually charge for returns however, those costs have to be absorbed, somehow. Consider the situation whereby, because returns are ‘free’, something like 50% of products purchased online are returned to the seller, sometimes because the colour isn’t quite what the customer was expecting or they just ‘changed’ their mind.
If you are a business like Rhenus High Tech then, it’s super important to consider how this will affect your profits and your ability to continue offering ‘free’ returns in the future, costs of returning goods will increase so, you may have to offer something a little different to people who are considering a return of an item that isn’t faulty. As a customer, there should be more care, attention and respect given to the purchase of your item and the fact that, if endless people return goods for, ‘avoidable’ reasons then, there will likely be an increase of product prices, either that or you might lose your supplier entirely.
When you’re sleeping, it’s still going on
Logistics is one of the few activities that take place whilst you are nice and warm, tucked up in bed sleeping, even the financial markets get a rest. Speedy delivery is something that people have become to rely upon, whereas it used to be a luxury that, you would probably pay a premium for, nowadays delivery services that are usually included within the cost of a product and are still expected to arrive quickly.
Consumer demands are a product of the system and cannot be helped but, what it does mean for logistics companies is that they often have to operate 24/7, 365 days of the year. Deliveries have to take place at almost any time of the day, especially for things like supermarket chains, they will often be receiving goods form their logistics providers all the way through the night into the early morning and, continue from there.
A little bit of patience goes a long way
If you are somebody that likes to track and trace your parcel or delivery and notice that it has hit some kind of ‘bottleneck’ after being dispatched for delivery, having a little patience and understand the logistics process will help to calm you down, if you start to worry that things have gone wrong somewhere down the line. The last phase of a products journey is normally the longest, prior to that your goods will, likely have been par of one larger shipment with very few stops on the way. When the goods are then sent out for delivery, they are part of a mixed variety of products going to a variety of places, hence, it just takes a little longer.