Online shopping and fast shipping, what happens when things go south?, featuring Ruomeng Cui

With online retailers like Amazon delivering nearly everything we could possibly need or want, often within a day or two of ordering it, we’ve become accustomed to and even reliant on the instant gratification that comes from shopping online. But what happens if access to expedited shipping were to suddenly and unexpectedly stop? Well for one online retail platform it did. Alibaba, an international online marketplace with nearly twice as many available products than Amazon, lost access to its shipping service for nearly 48 hours.

To provide more insight on what happened, what the fallout was for Alibaba, and what other online retail platforms can learn from this event, I am joined for this episode by Ruomeng Cui, professor with the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, to discuss her study “Value of High-Quality Logistics: Evidence from a Clash Between SF Express and Alibaba,” which will be published in the INFORMS journal Management Science.