The Role of Last-Mile Delivery in the Future of E-Commerce

Abstract

Last-Mile delivery has attracted considerable interest from the logistics suppliers and retail industry in the last few years. New technologies and approaches are being discussed both professional and academic side. The trend of new technologies developed for transportation will not stop and the reason is not hard to explain: The increase of online commerce and app-based ordering of almost everything from books to food, requires a large capacity, speed, and flexibility. Following the importance of last-mile delivery, this paper intends to investigate the expectations of consumers and parcel logistics provides regarding last- mile delivery. To do so, we conducted a literature review of last-mile to identify the main gaps found in the literature so far, aiming to extend the current literature. Our results showed that advances in last-mile delivery will depend on the capacity of logistics parcel services and consumers to align their expectations.