Solving the Last Mile Problem in E-Commerce
Valentina Britvina
1 a
, Nikita Glazkov
1 b
, Nadezhda Kolezneva
1 c
, Ekaterina Bobrova
2 d
, Kirill
Bobrov
2 f
and Anna Zueva
2,3 e
1
Moscow Polytechnic University, 38, Bolshaya Semyonovskaya str., Moscow, Russia
2
Lomonosov Moscow State University, 1, Leninskie Gory, Moscow, Russia
3
Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, 38, st. Shcherbakovskaya, Moscow, 105187,
Russia
Keywords: Pandemic, Delivery, Last Mile Problem, Geodata.
Abstract: Physical distancing and isolation measures used during COVID-19 have played a huge role in the
development of e-commerce. The increase in the number of online purchases around the world is forcing all
courier services to adapt to new delivery conditions. This article tells about a solution that can help to cope
with the problem of the last mile in Russia.
1 INTRODUCTION
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the fact that
people in the world have significantly limited any
interaction with one another. Voluntary social
distancing in order to avoid infection, as well as
strict state measures, have actually suspended, at
least temporarily, a significant share of traditional
retail trade.
0
2 THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
AND E-COMMERCE
In the United States of America (Advance Monthly
Sales For Retail And Food Services, May 2021),
retail sales and food sales in the period from
February to April 2020 decreased by 7.7% compared
to the same period in 2019. Nevertheless, sales of
any kind in online stores increased by 16% and
14.8%, respectively. In Europe, retail sales via the
Internet in April 2020 increased by 30% compared
to April 2019, while total retail sales decreased by
a0
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7056-144X
b
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0400-9849
c
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3048-2456
d
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5033-3861
f
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3737-8659
e
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4703-6679
17.9%. As a result, the transition from retail to e-
commerce will be significant in different countries.
For example, while the share of e-commerce in total
retail trade in the United States increased slowly
between the first quarter of 2018 and the first quarter
of 2020 (from 9.6% to 11.8%), it increased to 16.1%
between the first and second quarter of 2020. The
similar situation is observed in the UK, where the
share of e-commerce in retail increased from 17.3%
to 20.3% over the period from the first quarter of
2018 to the first quarter of 2020, and then
significantly increased to 31.3% over the period
from the first to the second quarter of 2020. Similar
changes are observed in other regions, including
China (Total Retail Sales of Consumer Goods
Achieve Positive Growth in August 2020), where
the share of online purchases in the total volume of
accumulated retail sales over the period from
January to August 2020 reached 24.6%, compared
with 19.4% in August 2019 and 17.3% in August
2018.
Although official statistics are not available for
most other countries, estimations show that in the
first half of 2020, online orders increased in several
regions, including Europe, North America and the
Asia-Pacific region (Javier LOPEZ-GONZALEZ,
Silvia SORESCU: Connecting Businesses and
Consumers During COVID-19: Trade in Parcels).
For the countries of the Asia-Pacific region, e-
commerce had already increased significantly in the
first quarter of 2020, while in Europe and North
Sadriddinov, M. and Morkovkin, D.
Formation of an Information and Digital Structure to Ensure the Functioning of Enterprises.
In Proceedings of the II International Scientific and Practical Conference "Information Technologies and Intelligent Decision Making Systems" (ITIDMS-II 2021), pages 19-21
ISBN: 978-989-758-541-8
Copyright
c
2022 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
19
America growth occurred later, namely after several
countries followed the example of Italy and
introduced restrictive measures. The fact that
requests to Google for the delivery of goods almost
doubled in some countries before the actual
restrictive measures were introduced (for example,
USA, the UK) illustrates the close relationship
between changes in consumers' behaviour, their
expectations and government actions.
Figure 1, a: Share of e-commerce in total retail sales,
United Kingdom and United States (2018-2020).
Figure 1.b: Retail turnover, year-on-year change,EU-27
(July 2019-20).
(US Census Bureau, Monthly Retail Trade; Internet sales
as a percentage of total retail sales (ratio) (%); Turnover
and volume of sales in wholesale and retail trade -
monthly data).
Figure 2: Statistics for the query "delivery" in the Google
search engine in different countries of the world (January
2020 - April 2020).
3 THE LAST MILE PROBLEM IN
DELIVERY PROCESS
The number of consumers shopping online is
growing along with the demand for fast and free
delivery of goods. Thus, in order to remain
competitive, e-commerce companies are constantly
looking for ways to increase efficiency and reduce
costs to improve their logistics. The main player in
this movement is the process of the so-called “last
mile”.
In other words, in order for a company to survive
in the modern market, it must find ways to increase
efficiency primarily in this area.
The last mile is the final stage of the delivery
chain, and its most important part, because that's
when the goods are delivered to the final destination,
to the customer.
Customers want their goods to be delivered
quickly and for free or at least for a very small
fee. However, the last mile is also the most difficult
and expensive part of logistics, which is quite a big
problem for online stores. The last mile is a large
part of the total cost of delivery. With e-commerce
giant Amazon delivering products in just two hours
now, companies are looking for ways to deliver their
own products as quickly as possible to keep their
customers happy and loyal.
Figure 3: Biggest challenge for logistics providers in last
mile (The Last mile Logistics whitepaper. The
Iconomization of the last mile // Localz, 2018.).
Companies know that they need to adapt to
survive. This often means reducing the additional
costs, which are about 25% of the price on average
(Kees Jacobs, Shannon Warner, Marc Rietra,
Lindsey Mazza, Jerome Buvat, Amol Khadikar,
Sumit Cherian, Yashwardhan Khemk: “The last-
mile delivery challenge: Giving retail and consumer
product customers a superior delivery experience
without impacting profitability”.), to meet consumer
demand, and this number only increases as
inefficiency becomes more and more expensive.
ITIDMS-II 2021 - II International Scientific and Practical Conference "Information Technologies and Intelligent Decision Making Systems"
20
Thus, you can imagine the potential return on
investment in improvement, especially considering
that the number of deliveries in most industries
continues to grow rapidly.
Most often, the introduction of goods pick-up
services and the installation of postamates are used
to solve the problem of the last mile at present. This
eliminates some problems, shifting the responsibility
to consumers. This can also significantly reduce the
amount of time that couriers spend on the road, since
they only need to visit several selected pick-up
points, and not several residential addresses.
This saves time twice, since often when people
do not open the door to receive a parcel, it is
delivered to the nearest pick-up point for receiving
or re-attempt delivery the next day.
4 LIMITATIONS
But, unfortunately, in Russia, this solution to the
problem of the last mile has little possibility of
implementation at the moment. Pick-up points and
postamates are still very unevenly developed, for
example, according to open data from the Moscow
government, which we were able to analyze, the
percentage of penetration in the Moscow region is
56%, and for the Krasnoyarsk region it’s only 6%.
According to M.S. Logachev, the work process
of modern companies requires an IT infrastructure,
providing not only data transfer, but also the ability
to make decisions and perform various business
operations, that can be considered as a structural
approach to systematizing processes. (Logachev M
S, Voronin I V, Britvina V V, Tichtchenko S А and
Altoukhov A V 2020 Local Area Network
Monitoring: The Issue of Broadcast Storm.
International Journal of Advanced Trends in
Computer Science and Engineering 9 4216-4222)
5 A SOLUTION TO THE
PROBLEM OF THE LAST MILE
IN RUSSIA
To solve this problem, a web application was
developed, the main competitive advantage of which
is direct access between the courier and the client
without intermediaries in the form of a company.
Common thing for courier services is when a
customer has a problem, they are sent to the support
service of the company, which cannot solve the
problem promptly, which reduces the customer's
loyalty. Another advantage is the ability of
customers to share GPS coordinates for quick
adaptation of couriers to their movements, the
courier will be able to find out how far from the
place of delivery or dispatch the customer is before
heading to it. Also, if we take into account the fact
that the application is designed exclusively for
courier services that deliver documents and / or
small-sized cargo, it will allow the courier to see
how far away his current customers are on the map.
And if, for example, one of the customers is within
walking distance from the courier and is ready to
accept the order, then he can do it without waiting
for the courier to arrive at the place of delivery or
dispatch, which will increase the key performance
indicators of the courier.
After registration, the user sees the adaptation
screen, which immerses him in the application.
When a user launches an application for the first
time, the adaptation process increases its value and
provides instructions that highlight key advantages
and functions. Next, the user places an order through
the application, choosing a convenient time for its
delivery and dispatch. Also, when placing an order,
the customer can choose to enable or disable the
geolocation tracking function. The courier also
monitors the customer's location before delivery to
optimize routes.
The latest web development technologies were
used, and we divide them into the following groups
while creating the application.
5.1 Interface Generation and Data
Processing
JavaScript / ES2020 is a multi-paradigm
programming language. Supports object-oriented,
imperative and functional styles. It is an
implementation of the ECMAScript specification.
SASS / SCSS is a CSS-based metalanguage
designed to increase the level of abstraction of CSS
code and simplify cascading style sheet files.
5.2 Organization of Development and
Uploading to the Server (Devops)
Docker is a software for automating the deployment
and management of applications in environments
with containerization support, application
containerizer.
Docker-compose is a tool designed to help define
and share multi-container (microservice
architecture) applications. With Compose, you can
create a YAML file to define your services and start
Formation of an Information and Digital Structure to Ensure the Functioning of Enterprises
21
and stop whatever you want with a single command.
The big advantage of using Compose is that you can
define the application stack in a file, save it to the
root of the project repository (version control is now
supported), and easily let another user participate in
the project. Another user will only need to clone the
repository and start creating the application
(Logachev, M.S., Voronin, I.V., Britvina, V.V.,
Tichtchenko, S.А., Altoukhov, A.V., 2020.).
Webpack is an open source JavaScript module
builder. It parses the modules of the application,
creates a dependency graph, then assembles the
modules in the correct order into one or more
bundles, which can be referenced by the "index.php"
file. npm is the package manager included with
Node.js.
Nginx is an HTTP server and reverse proxy,
mail proxy, and general purpose TCP / UDP proxy.
5.3 Technical Debt
Git and GitHub is a distributed version control
system. The development is used, which includes
GitHub Flow and work with the branch system;
Prettier is a code formatting tool that aims to use
hard-coded rules for the formatting of programs. It
formats the code automatically, helping to maintain
consistency and accountability in the Git version
control system.
Eslint is a static code analysis tool for identifying
problematic patterns found in JavaScript code. Rules
in ESLint are configurable and custom rules can be
defined and loaded using packages such as
Eslint-plugin-prettier - Runs Prettier, typically
ESLint and reports differences as separate ESLint
issues.
Babel-eslint - Allows cross-platform Babel code.
5.4 Interface Design
Figma is a graphical online collaboration editor. You
can create a website prototype, an application
interface and discuss edits with colleagues in real
time in it.
Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor
developed and distributed by Adobe Systems.
Adobe Photoshop is a multifunctional graphics
editor developed and distributed by Adobe Systems.
5.5 Client Part
The front end is based on Vue.js technology
(Glazkov N. O., Belyaeva D. V., Designing an
Online Generator Of Math Tasks For Students Of
Secondary, Vocational And Higher Educational
Institutions. Journal of scientific publications
"Theory and practice of project education", No.
4(12)/2019), an open source JavaScript framework
for building user interfaces. Easily integrates into
projects using other JavaScript libraries, such as:
Vue-router is the official routing library for Vue.js.
It integrates deeply with Vue.js and makes it easy to
create SPA applications. Includes the following
features:
1. Nested routes / views;
2. Modular router configuration;
3. Access to route parameters, query,
wildcards;
4. Vue.js based view transition animation;
5. Convenient navigation control;
6. Automatic setting of the active CSS class
for links;
7. HTML5 history or hash modes, with auto-
switching in IE9;
8. Configurable page scrolling behavior;
Vuex - state management pattern + library for
Vue.js applications. It serves as a centralized
repository for all application components, with rules
to ensure that state can only be changed predictably;
Vuelidate - Simple and lightweight model-based
Vue.js validation;
Vue-clickaway - Reusable “clickaway” directive
for reusable Vue.js components to detect clicks
outside of component boundaries;
Vue I18n is a plugin for Vue.js
internationalization. It easily integrates some
localization features into your Vue.js application;
Chart.js - Simple and flexible JavaScript charts
for designers and developers.
5.6 Server Part
Node.js is a V8-based software platform that
transforms JavaScript from a highly specialized
language into a general-purpose language. Node.js is
used primarily on the server, serving as a web
server. Node.js allows you to connect other external
libraries and use technologies such as (Kees Jacobs,
Shannon Warner, Marc Rietra, Lindsey Mazza,
Jerome Buvat, Amol Khadikar, Sumit Cherian,
Yashwardhan Khemk, 2020.):
Dotenv is a zero dependency module that
loads environment variables from a .env file
into process.env. Keeping configuration in an
environment separate from code is based on
the Twelve Factors application methodology;
ITIDMS-II 2021 - II International Scientific and Practical Conference "Information Technologies and Intelligent Decision Making Systems"
22
Compression - Node.js compression
middleware Debug is a tiny JavaScript
debugging utility modeled after the Node.js
core debugging technique. Works in Node.js
and web browsers;
Express.js is a web application framework for
Node.js, released as free and open source
software under the MIT license. It is designed
for building web applications and APIs. This
is the de facto standard framework for
Node.js;
Faker is a library that allows you to generate a
huge amount of fake data for testing the
system in the browser and Node.js;
Sequelize is a promise-based Node.js ORM
for Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, and
Microsoft SQL Server. Has robust support for
transactions, relationships, active and lazy
loading, read replication, and more;
PostgreSQL is a free object-relational database
management system. Available in
implementations for a variety of UNIX-like
platforms, including AIX, various BSD
systems, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, macOS,
Solaris / OpenSolaris, Tru64, QNX, and
Microsoft Windows (Zhichkin, K.A.,
Starikov, P.V., Zhichkina, L.N., Mamaev,
O.A., Artemova, E.I., Levochkina, N.A.,
2020.).
5.7 Client-Server Interaction
To organize client-server interaction, it was
decided to abandon the classic use of RESTful APIs
in favor of using GraphQL technology - an open
source query and manipulation language for APIs, as
well as a runtime environment for executing queries
with existing data. This method has the following
list of advantages (Glazkov, N.O., Belyaeva, D.V.,
2019.):
1. Simplicity of fetching all the necessary data
with one single request;
2. Caching;
3. Query performance;
4. Accurate data sampling;
5. Compatibility with modern applications;
6. Deprecation at the field level;
7. No need to create multiple REST requests.
To retrieve data, you only need to enter one query;
8. Not tied to a specific database or storage
engine;
9. A whole system of data types is used, etc.
Apollo GraphQL is a comprehensive state
management library that allows you to manage both
local and remote data using GraphQL. This
technology is used to retrieve, cache, and modify
application data when the user interface is
automatically updated.
6 TESTING AN INNOVATIVE
SOLUTION ON REAL
CUSTOMERS USING THE
USER'S GEODATA
To test the theory that our unique ideas can actually
influence the solution to the last mile problem, we
conducted testing. For this we have gathered two
groups of participants. The experimental group used
our application and the control group did not. The
experimental group consisted of 28 people, 47% of
whom were women, and 53% were men, their age
ranges from 20 to 35 years (20-25 years - 2%; 25-30
years - 92%; 30-35 years - 6%). The control group
consisted of 29 people, women were 58%, and men
41%, their age also varied from 20 to 35%, but
participants from 25 to 30 years old were 90%, from
20 to 25 years old 7%, and from 30 to 35 years 3%
respectively.
All participants rated the delivery on a five-point
system, where 2 is unsatisfactory and 5 is excellent.
You can see how the grades were distributed in the
following tables:
Table 1: Distribution of ratings of the participants of the
experiment.
Evaluations Groups
2
(unsatis
factory)
3
(satisfa
ctorily)
4
(good)
5
(excelle
nt)
Experim
ental
1 5 12 10
Controls 5 11 8 5
Table 2: Grouping of the ratings of the participants of the
experiment.
Evaluations Groups
2 or 3 (no effect) 4 or 5 (there is an
effect)
Experim
ental
6 21% 22 79%
Controls 16 35% 13 47%
Further, two hypotheses were put forward:
Formation of an Information and Digital Structure to Ensure the Functioning of Enterprises
23
H
0
- the proportion of customers who rated the
delivery as "good" and "excellent" in the
experimental group, no more than in the control
group.
H
1
- the proportion of customers who rated the
delivery as “good” and “excellent” in the
experimental group is higher than in the control
group.
Determined the φ values corresponding to the
percentages in each of the groups:
1
(79%) = 2.19
(1)
2
(47%) = 1.511
(2)
Set the significance level to 0.01.
A significance level of 0.01 corresponds to a
critical value:
crit
= 2.31
(3)
The empirical value of was calculated by
the formula:
21
21
21
)(
nn
nn
emp
=
56.2
29
28
2928
)511.119.2(
(4)
Since
critemp
, the hypothesis H
0
is rejected
and, therefore, the noted difference between the
experimental and control groups in the results of
evaluating the delivery of goods is statistically
significant.
The participants in the experimental group were
satisfied with the delivery and became more loyal to
the courier service.
7 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE
WORK
These results confirm that the problem of the last
mile in the delivery of goods is significant. To solve
it and improve the delivery process of goods, it is
necessary to use all modern e-commerce
capabilities. As we have stated elsewhere, the use of
user geodata for accelerated and high-quality
delivery can be considered as a promising direction
for solving the last mile.
Future research is needed to confirm what
conclusions can be drawn from this study.
Further research could fruitfully continue the
consideration of this issue in modern realities.
For further development of the product, we plan
to commercialize the system, provide services to
small and medium-sized businesses, and integrate
our web application into eco-systems popular in
Russia, such as Yandex inc. and OZON inc. The
functionality of the system will be also expanded by
optimizing processes using digitalization tools.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Britvina Valentina
Valentinovna for her extraordinary support in this
article process and our colleagues for their
wonderful collaboration. They supported us greatly
and were always willing to help us.
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ITIDMS-II 2021 - II International Scientific and Practical Conference "Information Technologies and Intelligent Decision Making Systems"
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