In the current E-commerce ecosystem, an ideal supply chain involves the delivery of an accurate product to a precise location, on the right time at a suitable price. To echo this thought further - Speed, Reliability & Cost are earmarked as the important pillars to judge the design of a good supply chain. An E-commerce marketplace model involves picking up of shipments from sellers & merchants with a daily load ranging as low as one shipment per seller to as high as 25,000 daily orders from these sellers.
This paper introduces an alternate supply chain design to enable first mile pick-up of shipments from high load sellers. Going further, the paper dives deep into this asset-less first mile design and henceforth illustrates its impact on Speed, Cost and Reliability of the supply chain of a particular logistic service provider.