What is the main difference between e-commerce warehouse and traditional warehouse?

With the development of e-commerce, the management of e-commerce warehouse is not only related to the service of logistics companies, but also closely related to the cost of e-commerce operators, which has become a topic of more and more attention.

Management comparison between e-commerce warehouse and traditional warehouse;

1, warehousing cycle. The order quantity is large, the order items are few, the goods under the project are few, and most of them are single-piece delivery. These order characteristics will lead to completely different picking methods, and in order to improve picking efficiency, special proprietary equipment is needed.

2. The average order quantity is very small. Traditional retail logistics has dozens or even hundreds of order lines, and these goods may be distributed in every corner of the warehouse. They are selected according to the order, and the warehouse walks around to complete the order selection. There are only a few order lines in e-commerce warehousing and logistics, most of which, such as JD.COM and Dangdang, will not exceed 10, and a few stores, such as 1, will be between 10 and 20. If you still choose to pick goods according to the orders commonly used in traditional retail logistics, you need to walk a lot in the warehouse every time to pick up a few pieces. Statistical analysis of a large number of actual combat data shows that as much as 70% of the time in the picking process is spent walking. Therefore, it is necessary to design a picking trip, which can complete multiple orders at the same time and improve picking efficiency, such as picking before sowing, or combining picking and sowing.

3. A single SKU has less inventory. Compared with traditional retail, e-commerce sales platform is not limited by traditional storefront space. Therefore, in order to attract and meet the needs of more customers, e-commerce sales SKUs should be more comprehensive, such as Amazon and Dangdang, with hundreds of thousands and millions of SKUs. However, since the storage space cannot be expanded indefinitely, how to put more SKUs in the limited storage space requires less stocking for each SKU. Therefore, the storage units in e-commerce warehousing logistics are mainly boxes, not traditional pallets. From the perspective of selecting storage equipment, we mainly choose box-type shelves, such as shelves or medium-sized shelves, rather than pallet shelves. In terms of operation strategy, most SKUs are integrated with warehousing and picking, and a small number of SKUs allocate storage and picking space respectively, and there are replenishment operations from warehousing to picking.

4. Require the correctness of the operation. Compared with traditional industries, the e-commerce industry has higher and stricter requirements for the accuracy of warehousing and logistics operations. Therefore, in the internal operation of e-commerce warehousing and logistics, we need to do our utmost to ensure the accuracy of picking goods. For the goods to be shipped out after picking, we need to do 100% full inspection, and in most cases we need to pack them. Therefore, in the planning and operation of e-commerce warehousing logistics, in addition to picking goods, improving the efficiency of audit and packaging is also a top priority.

5. Real-time operation is required. In recent years, many e-commerce companies, such as JD.COM, have rushed to introduce ultra-short delivery time. COM's 2 1 1 delivery, Yi Xun's three deliveries a day, etc. The warehouse is required to complete order selection, review, packaging and other operations within 1 and 2 hours. Compared with the traditional retail order response time of 24 hours or 48 hours, e-commerce warehousing and logistics operations should ensure the production of orders as soon as they arrive, and complete the production of orders in a short time. Therefore, how to improve the response speed of orders is also a research focus.

6. The order is very unstable. E-commerce promotion activities such as Shuang 1 1, Shuang 12, and store celebration day have attracted a large number of orders, and it is not uncommon to see news that they cannot reach customers within ten days and a half. It can be seen that the orders of e-commerce are very unstable. In the planning and design of e-commerce warehousing and logistics, the configuration of the site/personnel/equipment is flexible enough to meet the large-scale launch during the promotion period, and it is fast. At the same time, there are often some group buying/gathering cost-effective activities for single items or combination packages, which will also attract a large number of temporary orders and have extremely high requirements for back-end e-commerce warehousing and logistics. Therefore, in the logistics planning and process design of e-commerce, we also need to focus on the rapid production of such activity orders, and even design a special distribution process.

7. The return volume is very large. Due to the characteristics of the e-commerce industry, customers can't see the real thing, so they can only place an order according to the pictures and text descriptions. When receiving the physical object, there may be a big gap with the psychological expectation. Therefore, compared with traditional retail logistics, e-commerce has a lot of returns. For the back-end e-commerce warehousing logistics, it is necessary to have a strong ability to handle returns, quickly select returns, and ensure that returns can be put on the shelves in time.