Acceso usuarios
Vigo, España
El crecimiento global del comercio electrónico continúa y las cadenas de suministro tradicionales se reinventan. A día de hoy, todavía no existe un marco que defina qué temas han sido los más presentes en la literatura sobre este aspecto.
El objetivo de este artículo es ofrecer una recopilación bibliográfica actualizada sobre las implicaciones de este nuevo canal de ventas en la cadena de suministro, con una visión centrada en la figura de los e-retailers. En este marco, analizamos tanto los modelos de venta que se centran únicamente en el mercado online (puros e-retailers), como los que desarrollan una estrategia multicanal.
E-commerce has been growing tremendously over the past few years, and traditional supply chains are now compelled to reinvent themselves. An analysis of the literature shows that a frame for the most common topics on this new environment is not adequately developed. The main goal of this paper is to develop a state-of-the-art literature review on the implications of the online channel for traditional supply chains, and to identify possible gaps between available literature and real management issues.
The literature review is based on 62 journal articles published between 2011 and 2016, and all the papers are classified according to the main themes addressed and the research methodology. This establishes a new frame-work that helps academics, researchers, and practitioners better understand new types of sup-ply chains and inspire future research. The publications were analyzed from a retailer perspective; there-fore the business-to-consumer (B2C) sales mode is the main focus of our review. Business-to-business (B2B) oriented publications were not included in the analysis. Also, we focus our analysis on both pure e-retailers and multi-channel retailers. Pure e-retailers sell products only through the online channel, and multi-channel retailers operate through both traditional and online channels. This integration between channels brings new opportunities for traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, but it also requires a lot of trade-off decisions. Market cannibalization, which refers to a decrease in retail sales as a result of the in-troduction of the online channel, is one of the biggest challenges companies face. Furthermore, with the rise of e-commerce, marketing and operations management are more closely interlinked, and therefore decisions in both fields are included in this review.
We identify e-commerce adoption and network design, customer service, pricing, e-fulfillment, inventory management, reverse logistics, and environmental issues as the main topics regarding new supply chains. As far as the methodology is concerned, mathematical models and empirical studies are the most common research methodology methods, and combined they represent more than 80% of the sample of publications.
