My Solutions to The Problems of Online Economy

The rapidly evolving online economy touches virtually every aspect of our lives. We now turn to Yelp to choose a restaurant, Airbnb for a weekend getaway, Uber for a ride, and Amazon to purchase products. All across the nation, and more specifically within the Plymouth-Canton community, large warehouse stores such as Sears, Macy’s, and KMart are going out of business. This is due to the increasing demand in the online marketplace where consumers can acquire goods for cheaper prices. Selling goods and services online is beneficial for both consumers and producers. Consumers can easily and effectively order goods to their home by the click of a button; and with websites like Amazon, they can have nearly any product at their doorstep within 48 hours of its purchase all without leaving their house. Merchants can conveniently list their products online that are accessible by people all over the globe and reach a greater customer base than they would by putting their products in brick-and-mortar stores. The big problem with this transition toward an online economy is that it’s forcing people into unemployment and leaving empty warehouses in nearly every U.S. city.

My proposal to solving this issue is to convert these abandoned warehouses into distribution facilities for companies like Amazon and AliExpress. To be more specific, I want to transform the empty stores into places where large inventories of goods can be kept and then shipped to the immediate communities surrounding it. I also want to develop computer systems that take into account the types of goods that people from different geographic regions order and then stock the facilities according to these interests. These facilities would also need employees, so jobs would be created with positions in the fields of inventory management, warehouse management, and logistics, among others. This would make use of the wasted space and the lost jobs. By converting these spaces into distribution warehouses, the time it would take to transport a product to a consumer's home would decrease significantly.

To decrease the shipment time even more, the companies could utilize drones and shift closer to a same-day delivery; something that companies such as Flirtey and Zipline are already doing. Using drones will also help decrease transportation costs involved in getting products from the distribution facilities to the consumer.The economy is continuously changing; and with the uprise of online marketplaces, we as a population must adapt to this altering style of transactions. The online economy creates new markets and content where none existed. With low capital requirements, well-known successes, and the ability to experiment and adapt rapidly, the rise of the digital economy provides new opportunities and distinctive management challenges for entrepreneurs and traditional businesses alike.