Logistic order-fulfillment in e-commerce: a case study of pure-plays and click-and-mortars in the B2C market

Abstract: Electronic commerce is increasing every year as more and more potential
customers are connected to the Internet. This brings serious challenges for
online companies in areas such as, ordering infrastructure, inventory
management, transportation and return logistics.

This master thesis has been accomplished with cooperation of five companies,
the department of industrial marketing and e-commerce and the department of
industrial logistics.

The main task of the thesis is to investigate if there are any differences in
the logistic order fulfillment in companies that started their businesses
directly online and companies that adopted online activities after first
establishing an offline business. In order to answer the task the research
will not only describe the order fulfillment process in the studied cases but
also the authors view of the strategies and models used in each company are
given and analyzed.

The conclusion showed that the differences are not only bounded whether the
company is purely online or acting in both online and offline commerce.
Instead other factors such as size and the strategies chosen for the online
activities are the crucial reasons for the similarities and dissimilarities
between the studied companies.