Facing endless queues at shops in the days leading up to Christmas is no longer a reality for many Brazilians. Proximity logistics to meet increasingly shorter delivery times has become one of the priorities in retail at giants like Amazon.
“An unchanging trend in the e-commerce market is delivery times”, says the leader of Amazon Logistics in Brazil, Rafael Caldas. At Amazon, founder Jeff Bezzos’ idea resonates that if there is something that consumers will never complain about, it is the speed with which their product arrives at home.
In recent years, , called “last mile” (last mile, translated into Portuguese), has entered the center of the expansion strategy of Amazon and its competitors in Brazil.
“In any e-commerce company today, the biggest cost of operating the product is logistics and, within the logistics cost, the biggest cost is in the last mile”, says Caldas. Mercado Livre () and Magazine Luíza () are some of the main competitors in the sector and have also reinforced their fast delivery strategies.
Keeping an eye on the triad of retail competition made up of price, product assortment and delivery speed, the competition is increasingly fierce. In September this year, the Chinese .
Everything comes back to Bezzos’ observation: people want faster and faster deliveries. According to a survey by Intelipost, published by E-Commerce Brasil, the ideal delivery time for 41% of Brazilian consumers is 2 days.
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Part of this delivery speed goes through the last mile: that part of the operation that stores products in smaller stations based on intelligence. The assortment distributes potential sales based on the behavior of consumers in a region and the demand for them.
It is a type of operation that relies on modes such as motorcycles, vans, passenger vehicles and, in the case of Amazon, even boats in regions crossed by the Amazon River.
In the case of Amazon, there are more than 130 delivery stations and 10 distribution centers spread across the country.
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“In countries where e-commerce is more developed, it is possible to see the stages of development very clearly”, says Caldas. “First come the large centralized warehouses in one to three of the largest cities in that country. Then, regionalization begins, with medium-sized warehouses, and later, even smaller ones and very close to customers’ homes, sometimes with essential consumer products.”
