Last mile logistics requirements on secondary e-commerce packaging: Application to CDON

Sammanfattning: This master’s thesis is the final step of the master’s degree in Supply chain and Logistics taken in the Lunds Tekniska Högskola. Buying products on the internet is a trend that has been increasing with the passing years. Even though nowadays this shopping behavior is established in our lives, it is predicted that it will keep growing within the next upcoming years. These changes in the shopping behavior have come up faster than the necessary changes in some packaging requirements. The present project focuses on understanding what requirements need to meet the secondary packaging solutions for e-commerce at the very last part of the supply chain, the last mile logistics. To conduct the research, first, an extensive literature review was conducted in order to understand what has been studied in this field and what needs to be studied. Following, a real e-commerce company was selected, and the research was applied to it, by studying the different packaging solutions employed and discovering the importance given by the company to the different packaging requirements when selecting the packaging solutions. Parameters like volume utilization or dimensional weight were measured and calculated for different products and packaging solutions. In addition, the different incentives, barriers and trade-offs for improving the employed packaging solutions to more logistically efficient ones are presented