Even as the e-commerce sector overall continues expanding toward a forecasted 41% of all retail sales by 2027, many small to medium e-commerce companies are struggling to find the investment funding they need to increase sales, according to a sector survey from online capital platform Stenn.
Global geopolitical instability and increasing inflation are causing e-commerce firms to face a liquidity crisis, which means companies may not be able to access the funds they need to grow, Stenn’s survey of 500 senior e-commerce leaders found. The research was conducted by Opinion Matters between August 29 and September 5.
Survey findings include:
61.8% of leaders who sought growth capital did so to invest in advanced technologies, such as AI and machine learning, to improve their businesses.
When asked which resources they wished they had more access to, 63.8% of respondents pointed to growth capital.
Women indicated a stronger need for business operations training (51.2%) and financial planning resources (48.8%) compared to men (30.8% and 15.4%).
40% of business owners are seeking external financial advice and mentorship at least once a week to help with business decisions.
Almost half (49.6%) of respondents are proactively forecasting their business activity 6-18 months ahead.
“As e-commerce continues to grow rapidly, driven by increasing online consumer demand and technological innovation, it’s important to remember that capital constraints and access to growth financing remain persistent hurdles for many e-commerce business leaders especially at small and medium-sized businesses,” Noel Hillman, Chief Commercial Officer at Stenn, said in a release. “In this competitive landscape, ensuring liquidity and optimizing supply chain processes are critical to sustaining growth and scaling operations.”
With six keynote and more than 100 educational sessions, CSCMP EDGE 2024 offered a wealth of content. Here are highlights from just some of the presentations.
A great American story
Author and entrepreneur Fawn Weaver closed out the first day of the conference by telling the little-known story of Nathan “Nearest” Green, who was born into slavery, freed after the Civil War, and went on to become the first master distiller for the Jack Daniel’s Whiskey brand. Through extensive research and interviews with descendants of the Daniel and Green families, Weaver discovered what she describes as a positive American story.
She told the story in her best-selling book, Love & Whiskey: The Remarkable True Story of Jack Daniel, His Master Distiller Nearest Green, and the Improbable Rise of Uncle Nearest. That story also inspired her to create Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey.
Weaver discussed the barriers she encountered in bringing the brand to life, her vision for where it’s headed, and her take on the supply chain—which she views as both a necessary cost of doing business and an opportunity.
“[It’s] an opportunity if you can move quickly,” she said, pointing to a recent project in which the company was able to fast-track a new Uncle Nearest product thanks to close collaboration with its supply chain partners.
A two-pronged business transformation
We may be living in a world full of technology, but strategy and focus remain the top priorities when it comes to managing a business and its supply chains. So says Roberto Isaias, executive vice president and chief supply chain officer for toy manufacturing and entertainment company Mattel.
Isaias emphasized the point during his keynote on day two of EDGE 2024. He described how Mattel transformed itself amid surging demand for Barbie-branded items following the success of the Barbie movie.
That transformation, according to Isaias, came on two fronts: commercially and logistically. Today, Mattel is steadily moving beyond the toy aisle with two films and 13 TV series in production as well as 14 films and 35 shows in development. And as for those supply chain gains? The company has saved millions, increased productivity, and improved profit margins—even amid cost increases and inflation.
A framework for chasing excellence
Most of the time when CEOs present at an industry conference, they like to talk about their companies’ success stories. Not J.B. Hunt’s Shelley Simpson. Speaking at EDGE, the trucking company’s president and CEO led with a story about a time that the company lost a major customer.
According to Simpson, the company had a customer of their dedicated contract business in 2001 that was consistently making late shipments with no lead time. “We were working like crazy to try to satisfy them, and lost their business,” Simpson said.
When the team at J.B. Hunt later met with the customer’s chief supply chain officer and related all they had been doing, the customer responded, “You never shared everything you were doing for us.”
Out of that experience, came J.B. Hunt’s Customer Value Delivery framework. The framework consists of five steps: 1) understand customer needs, 2) deliver expectations, 3) measure results, 4) communicate performance, and 5) anticipate new value.
Next year’s CSCMP EDGE conference on October 5–8 in National Harbor, Md., promises to have a similarly deep lineup of keynote presentations. Register early at www.cscmpedge.org.
2024 was expected to be a bounce-back year for the logistics industry. We had the pandemic in the rearview mirror, and the economy was proving to be more resilient than expected, defying those prognosticators who believed a recession was imminent.
While most of the economy managed to stabilize in 2024, the logistics industry continued to see disruption and changes in international trade. World events conspired to drive much of the narrative surrounding the flow of goods worldwide. Additionally, a diminished reliance on China as a source for goods reduced some of the international trade flow from that manufacturing hub. Some of this trade diverted to other Asian nations, while nearshoring efforts brought some production back to North America, particularly Mexico.
Meanwhile trucking in the United States continued its 2-year recession, highlighted by weaker demand and excess capacity. Both contributed to a slow year, especially for truckload carriers that comprise about 90% of over-the-road shipments.
Labor issues were also front and center in 2024, as ports and rail companies dealt with threats of strikes, which resulted in new contracts and increased costs. Labor—and often a lack of it—continues to be an ongoing concern in the logistics industry.
In this annual issue, we bring a year-end perspective to these topics and more. Our issue is designed to complement CSCMP’s 35th Annual State of Logistics Report, which was released in June, and includes updates that were presented at the CSCMP EDGE conference held in October. In addition to this overview of the market, we have engaged top industry experts to dig into the status of key logistics sectors.
Hopefully as we move into 2025, logistics markets will build on an improving economy and strong consumer demand, while stabilizing those parts of the industry that could use some adrenaline, such as trucking. By this time next year, we hope to see a full recovery as the market fulfills its promise to deliver the needs of our very connected world.
If you feel like your supply chain has been continuously buffeted by external forces over the last few years and that you are constantly having to adjust your operations to tact through the winds of change, you are not alone.
The Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals’ (CSCMP’s) “35th Annual State of Logistics Report” and the subsequent follow-up presentation at the CSCMP EDGE Annual Conference depict a logistics industry facing intense external stresses, such as geopolitical conflict, severe weather events and climate change, labor action, and inflation. The past 18 months have seen all these factors have an impact on demand for transportation and logistics services as well as capacity, freight rates, and overall costs.
The “State of Logistics Report” is an annual study compiled and authored by a team of analysts from Kearney for CSCMP and supported and sponsored by logistics service provider Penske Logistics. The purpose of the report is to provide a snapshot of the logistics industry by assessing macroeconomic conditions and providing a detailed look at its major subsectors.
One of the key metrics the report has tracked every year since its inception in 1988 is U.S. business logistics costs (USBLC). This year’s report found that U.S. business logistics costs went down in 2023 for the first time since the start of the pandemic. As Figure 1 shows, U.S. business logistics costs for 2023 dropped 11.2% year-over-year to $2.4 trillion, or 8.7% of last year’s $27.4 trillion gross domestic product (GDP).
“This was not unexpected,” said Josh Brogan, Kearney partner and lead author of the report, during a press conference in June announcing the results. “After the initial impacts of COVID were felt in 2020, we saw a steady rise of logistics costs, even in terms of total GDP. What we are seeing now is a reversion more toward the mean.”
This breakdown of U.S. Business Logistics Costs for 2023 shows an across-the-board decline in all transportation costs.
CSCMP's 35th Annual "State of Logistics Report"
As a result, Figure 1 shows an across-the-board decline in transportation costs (except for some administrative costs) for the 2023 calendar year. “What such a chart cannot fully capture about this period is the intensification of certain external stressors on the global economy and its logistical networks,” says the report. “These include a growing geopolitical instability that further complicates investment and policy decisions for business leaders and government officials.”Both the report and the follow-up session at the CSCMP EDGE Conference in October provided a vivid picture of the global instability that logistics providers and shippers are facing. These conditions include (but are not limited to):
An intensification of military conflict, with the Red Sea Crisis being particularly top of mind for companies shipping from Asia to Europe or to the eastern part of North America;
Continued fragmentation of global trade, as evidenced by the deepening rift between China and the United States;
Climate change and severe weather events, such as the drought in Panama, which lowered water levels in the Panama Canal, and the two massive hurricanes that ripped through the Southeastern United States;
Labor disputes, such as the three-day port strike which stopped operations at ports along the East and Gulf Coasts of the United States in October; and
Persistent inflation (despite some recent improvement in the United States) and muted global economic growth.
At the same time that the logistics market was dealing with these external factors, it was also facing sluggish freight demand and an ongoing excess of capacity. These twin dynamics have contributed to continued low cargo rates through 2024.
“For 2024, I foresee a generally flat USBLC as a percentage of GDP,” says Brogan. “We did see increases in air and ocean costs in preparation for the East Coast port strike but overall, road freight is down. I think this will balance out with the relatively low level of inflation seen in the general economy.”
Breakdown by mode
The following is a quick review of how the forces outlined above are affecting the primary logistics sectors, as described by the “State of Logistics Report” and the updated presentation given at the CSCMP EDGE Conference in early October.
Trucking: A downturn in consumer demand plus a lingering surplus in capacity led to a plunge in rates in 2023 compared to 2022. Throughout 2024, however, rates have remained relatively stable. Speaking in October, report author Brogan said he expects that trend to continue for the near future. On the capacity side, despite thousands of companies having departed the market since 2022, the number of departures has not been as high as would normally be expected during a down market. Brogan accounts this to investors expecting to see some turbulence in the marketplace and being willing to stick around longer than has traditionally been the case.
Parcel and last mile: Parcel volumes in 2023 were down by 0.5% compared to 2022. Simultaneously, there has been a move away from UPS and FedEx, both of which saw their year-over-year parcel volumes decline in 2023. Nontraditional competitors have taken larger portions of the parcel volume, including Amazon, which passed UPS for the largest parcel carrier in the U.S. in 2023. Additionally, there has been an increasing use of regional providers, as large shippers continue to shift away from “single sourcing” their carrier base. Parcel volumes have increased in 2024, mostly driven by e-commerce. Brogan expects regional providers to claim “the lion’s share” of this volume.
Rail: In 2023, Class I railroads experienced a challenging financial environment, characterized by a 4% increase in operating ratios, a 2% decline in revenue, and an 11% decrease in operating income compared to 2022. These financial troubles were primarily driven by intermodal volume decreases, service challenges, inflationary pressures, escalated fuel and labor expenses, and a surge in employee headcount. The outlook for 2024 is slightly more promising, according to Kearney. Intermodal, often regarded a primary growth driver, has seen increased volumes and market share. Class I railroads are also seeing some positive operational developments with train speeds increasing by 2.3% and terminal dwell times decreasing by 1.8%. Finally, opportunities are opening up for an expansion in cross-border rail traffic within North America.
Air: The air freight market saw a steep decline in costs year over year from 2022 to 2023. Rates in 2024 began flat before starting to pick up in the summer, and report authors expect to see demand increase by 4.5%. Part of the demand pickup is due to disruptions in key sea lanes, such as the Suez Canal, causing shippers to convert from ocean to air. Meanwhile, the capacity picture has been mixed with some lanes having a lot of capacity while others have none. Much of this dynamic is due to Chinese e-commerce retailers Temu and Shein, which depend heavily on airfreight to execute their business models. In order to serve this booming business, some airfreight providers have pulled capacity out of more niche markets, such as flights into Latin America or Africa, and are now using those planes to serve the Asia-to-U.S. or Asia-to-Europe lanes.
Water/ports: The recent “State of Logistics Report” indicated that waterborne freight experienced a very steep decline of 64.2% in expenditures in 2023 relative to 2022. This was mostly due to muted demand, overcapacity, and a normalization from the inflated ocean rates seen during the pandemic years. After the trough of 2023, the market has been seeing significant “micro-spikes” in rates on some lanes due to constraints caused by geopolitical issues, such as the Red Sea conflict and the U.S. East and Gulf Coast ports strike. Kearney foresees a continuation of these rate hikes for the next few months. However, over the long term, the market will have to deal with the overcapacity that was built up during the height of the pandemic, which will cause rates to soften. Ultimately, however, Brogan said he did not expect to see a return to 2023 rate levels.
Third-party logistics (3PLs): The third-party logistics (3PL) sector is facing some significant challenges in 2024. Low freight rates and excess capacity could force some 3PLs to consolidate, especially if they are smaller players and rely on venture capital funding. Meanwhile, Kearney reports that there is some redefining of traditional roles going on within the 3PL-shipper ecosystem. For example, some historically asset-light 3PLs are expanding into asset-heavy services, and some shippers are trying to monetize their own logistics capabilities by marketing them externally.
Freight forwarding: Major forwarders had a shaky final quarter of 2023, seeing a decline in financial performance. To regain form, Kearney asserts that forwarders will need to increase their focus on technology, value-added services, and tiered servicing. Overall, the forwarding sector is expected to grow at slow rate in coming years, with a projected annual growth rate of 5.5% for the period of 2023–2032.
Warehousing: According to Brogan an interesting phenomenon is occurring in the warehousing market with the average asking rents continuing to rise even though vacancy rates have also increased. There are several reasons for this mixed message, according to the “State of Logistics” report, including: longer contract durations, enhanced facility features, and steady demand growth. A record-breaking level of new construction and new facilities, however, have helped to stabilize rent prices and increase vacancy rates, according to the report authors.
Path forward
What is the way forward given these uncertain times? For many shippers and carriers, a fresh look at their networks and overall supply chains may be in order. Many companies are currently reassessing their distribution networks and operations to make sure that they are optimized. In these cost-sensitive times, that may involve consolidating facilities, eliminating redundant capacity, or rebalancing inventory.
It’s important to realize, however, that network optimization should not just focus on eliminating unnecessary costs. It should also ensure that the network has the right amount of capacity to response with agility and flexibility to any future disruptions. Companies must look at their supply chain networks as a whole and think about how they can be utilized to unlock strategic advantage.
The federal Transportation Security Administration (TSA) yesterday proposed a rule that would mandate some surface transportation owners and operators, including those running pipelines and railroads, to meet certain cyber risk management and reporting requirements.
The new rule would require:
Owner/operators of pipelines and/or railroads that have a higher cybersecurity risk profiles to establish and maintain a comprehensive cyber risk management program;
Owner/operators that are currently required to report significant physical security concerns to TSA to also report cybersecurity incidents to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; and
Higher-risk pipeline owner/operators to designate a physical security coordinator and report significant physical security concerns to TSA.
"TSA has collaborated closely with its industry partners to increase the cybersecurity resilience of the nation's critical transportation infrastructure," TSA Administrator David Pekoske said in a release. "The requirements in the proposed rule seek to build on this collaborative effort and further strengthen the cybersecurity posture of surface transportation stakeholders. We look forward to industry and public input on this proposed regulation."
The notice came a week after a White House representative warned the trucking freight industry that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has remained the most active and persistent cyber threat to the U.S. government, private sector, and critical infrastructure networks. The briefing came from a member of the administration’s Office of the National Cyber Director, in an address to attendees at the National Motor Freight Traffic Association (NMFTA)’s Cybersecurity Conference.
“In January, the National Cyber Director testified in front of Congress along with colleagues from CISA, NSA, and the FBI about this threat from the PRC, dubbed Volt Typhoon,” speaker Stephen Viña said in his remarks. “Volt Typhoon conducted cyber operations focused not on financial gain, espionage, or state secrets but on developing deep access to our critical infrastructure. This includes the energy sector transportation systems, among many others. A prolonged interruption to these critical services could disrupt our ability to mobilize in the event of a national emergency or conflict and can create panic among our citizens. Ultimately, if trucking stops, America stops.”
Online merchants should consider seven key factors about American consumers in order to optimize their sales and operations this holiday season, according to a report from DHL eCommerce.
First, many of the most powerful sales platforms are marketplaces. With nearly universal appeal, 99% of U.S. shoppers buy from marketplaces, ranked in popularity from Amazon (92%) to Walmart (68%), eBay (47%), Temu (32%), Etsy (28%), and Shein (21%).
Second, they use them often, with 61% of American shoppers buying online at least once a week. Among the most popular items are online clothing and footwear (63%), followed by consumer electronics (33%) and health supplements (30%).
Third, delivery is a crucial aspect of making the sale. Fully 94% of U.S. shoppers say delivery options influence where they shop online, and 45% of consumers abandon their baskets if their preferred delivery option is not offered.
That finding meshes with another report released this week, as a white paper from FedEx Corp. and Morning Consult said that 75% of consumers prioritize free shipping over fast shipping. Over half of those surveyed (57%) prioritize free shipping when making an online purchase, even more than finding the best prices (54%). In fact, 81% of shoppers are willing to increase their spending to meet a retailer’s free shipping threshold, FedEx said.
In additional findings from DHL, the Weston, Florida-based company found:
43% of Americans have an online shopping subscription, with pet food subscriptions being particularly popular (44% compared to 25% globally). Social Media Influence:
61% of shoppers use social media for shopping inspiration, and 26% have made a purchase directly on a social platform.
37% of Americans buy from online retailers in other countries, with 70% doing so at least once a month. Of the 49% of Americans who buy from abroad, most shop from China (64%), followed by the U.K. (29%), France (23%), Canada (15%), and Germany (13%).
While 58% of shoppers say sustainability is important, they are not necessarily willing to pay more for sustainable delivery options.