The impact of sustainability on performance of Finnish and Swedish crowd-shipping companies

Abstract

Last-mile delivery is getting more and more attention nowadays as consumers evaluate the entire supply chain based on the last-mile delivery performance. Since the first wave of coronavirus infection began e-commerce market has expanded rapidly, therefore, to succeed in a changed market conditions companies have to find new ways how to make deliveries faster, cheaper, and more sustainable. One of the solutions is to outsource the last stage of the supply chain to ordinary people which is called crowd-shipping. Sustain-ability, in its turn, helps to build a strong and versitile supply chain that responds quickly to the recent expansion of e-commerce market and its changing conditions, and brings major benefits for all parties involved. The data has been collected using qualitative method to examine the role sustainability plays in Swedish and Finnish crowd-shipping companies and how those companies man-age sustainability throughout their supply chains. Based on the literature review the data collected in regard to several crowd-shipping companies in Finland and Sweden has been analyzed and the impact sustainability has on supply chain performance of studied com-panies has been identified. The results have been generalizabled for the Nordic crowd-shipping industry since all existing companies in Finland and Sweden were studied and the pattern of growing at-tention to sustainability in this industry has been found. The conslusion was that crowd-shipping is a relatively new concept and there is yet many pitfalls that have to be over-come, however, it is a promising business model that will help to improve the overall performance of supply chains.