UPS orders 10,000 electric delivery trucks, plans driverless truck test

UPS orders 10,000 electric delivery trucks, plans test of self-driving vans

 ATLANTA – UPS ordered 10,000 electric delivery trucks from electric vehicle maker Arrival, in what it calls a move to accelerate electrification of the fleet.

It is the largest single order for electric vehicles from the shipping giant based in Sandy Springs.

The two companies are working together to develop electric vehicles with advanced driver assistance systems, including the potential for automated movement in UPS warehouses, technology that it will test starting this year.

UPS also announced that it is partnering with Waymo to test autonomous vehicle package pickups in the Phoenix area. UPS said Waymo’s Chrysler Pacific minivans will transport packages from UPS stores to a UPS sorting facility, with a driver on board to monitor operations. The technology allows the company to test subsequent pickups at UPS stores.

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Mary Meeker’s most important trends on the internet

Mary Meeker, Code 2019/Recode

It’s the holiday season for data nerds: That is, Mary Meeker is delivering her annual Internet Trends Report — the most highly anticipated slide deck in Silicon Valley — again at Code Conference 2019.

The general partner at venture capital firm Bond Capital delivered a rapid-fire 333-page slideshow that looked back at every important internet trend in the last year and looked forward about what these trends tell us to expect in the year ahead. The “Queen of the Internet” and former Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner touched on everything from accelerating internet ad spend in the US to the growth of digital delivery services in Latin America.

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Retailers rethink physical stores as click-and-collect catches on

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Buy online, pick-up in store is often heralded as the future of retail: Customers shopping on their own terms, as efficiently as possible. But it might end up being a bigger lift than expected for retail stores.

Large retailers like Target, Walmart, Kroger and Home Depot are using store pickup to cut delivery costs, encourage customer interaction with associates, and drive in-store sales growth. It’s a strategy that seems to be working: according to an International Council of Shopping Centers 2018 holiday season survey, 86 percent of U.S. shoppers purchased something new while picking up e-commerce orders in stores. Target saw a 5.7 percent holiday sales bump for November and December, in part due to store pickup. And three out of every four digital Target orders are fulfilled by a store, evidence of the central place stores can play in an e-commerce supply chain.

“We consider our stores our single biggest competitive advantage; they function as service hubs, fulfillment hubs, and they’re incredible showrooms for inspiration,” said Target CEO Brian Cornell at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show this week.

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India bans ecommerce companies from selling their own products

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“An entity having equity participation by e-commerce marketplace entity or its group companies, or having control on its inventory by e-commerce marketplace entity or its group companies, will not be permitted to sell its products on the platform run by such marketplace entity,” the commerce ministry said in a statement.

Ecommerce companies can make bulk purchases through their wholesale units or other group companies that in turn sell the products to select sellers, such as their affiliates or other companies with which they have agreements.

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Alibaba just had the biggest online shopping day of all time, nearly tripling every company’s 2017 Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales combined

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Alibaba founder Jack Ma. Marcos Brindicci/Reuters

  • Alibaba made e-commerce history on Sunday, with $30.8 billion in sales over the last 24 hours as part of the company’s massive Singles Day celebration.
  • The $30.8 billion in generated sales is a significant increase from 2017, when customers spent $25.3 billion.
  • For comparison, total online sales on Black Friday reached $5 billion in 2017, according to Adobe Analytics data. Cyber Monday sales last year reached about $6.6 billion.

SHANGHAI, China — Alibaba just made e-commerce history.

With the company’s massive Singles Day celebration on 11/11 — November 11 — coming to a close, Alibaba reports that customers spent $30.8 billion online over the last 24 hours. That is a significant increase from the $25.3 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) Alibaba shoppers spent in 2017.

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How e-commerce is transforming rural China

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JD.com is expanding its consumer base with drone delivery and local recruits who can exploit villages’ tight-knit social networks to drum up business.

In isolated regions, JD.com is expanding its reach, creating on-the-ground jobs and testing drone delivery. Will villagers be less tempted to leave for the big city?

Xia Canjun was born in 1979, the youngest of seven siblings, in Cenmang, a village of a hundred or so households nestled at the foot of the Wuling Mountains, in the far west of Hunan Province. Xia’s mother was illiterate, and his father barely finished first grade. The family made a living as corn farmers, and had been in Cenmang for more generations than anyone could remember. The region was poor, irrigation was inadequate—the family often went hungry—and there were few roads. Trips to the county seat, Xinhuang, ten miles away, were made twice a year, on a rickety three-wheeled cart, and until the age of ten Xia didn’t leave the village at all. But he was never particularly unhappy. “When you are a frog at the bottom of the well, the world is both big and small,” he likes to say, referring to a famous fable by Zhuangzi, the Aesop of ancient China, in which a frog, certain that nowhere can be as good as the environment he knows, is astonished when a turtle tells him about the sea. As a child, Xia said, he was “a happy frog,” content to play in the dirt roads between the mud houses of the village.

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Illegal drugs are easy to order on China’s open online drug market

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Illegal drugs from China are as easy as typing on a keyboard to order. More than 150 Chinese companies sell alpha-PVP, according to  guidechem.com. alpha-PVP is also known as flakka, a dangerous stimulant that is illegal in the United States but not in China, and was blamed for 18 recent deaths in one Florida county.

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Amazon plans to put 3D printers in trucks to speed up deliveries

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Amazon wants to speed up shipping, but with this new system they might not have to worry about sending items at all.  Amazon has filed several patent applications for a system that could print goods on-demand in “mobile manufacturing hubs”, using 3D printers to produce the items on the curbs outside customers’ homes.   Continue reading… “Amazon plans to put 3D printers in trucks to speed up deliveries”

Holiday shoppers were too fast for even the cleverest algorithms this season

A late surge in online consumer buying overwhelmed the ability of e-commerce retailers and shippers to get products out on time.

Holiday shopping activity was greater than expected, signalling the economy is steadily continuing on a strong growth path. Even though holiday shopping was greater than expected it caught a lot of retailers and shippers by surprise.

 

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Amazon vs. Indie self-publishing sales platforms

With an indie, as soon as you upload the file, you can sell it. With KDP, you’ve got to wait until it appears on Amazon.

Web designer and writer, Paul Jarvis has self-published three books and has sold close to a total of 10,000 copies. With two of the books he used Gumroad and Sellfy which are indie sales platforms (digital goods e-commerce services). His latest book was on Amazon’s KDP Select platform.

 

 

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Taobao breaks mobile shopping record in less than an hour with over $100 million in sales

China’s leading e-commerce marketplace.

Taobao, China’s leading e-commerce marketplace, racked up RMB 1 billion ($164 million) in mobile purchases from over 14 million user accounts one hour into China’s annual Single’s Day shopping blitz,

 

 

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