by Walther Ploos van Amstel
For a company that operates more than 9,800 stores across two continents, Ahold Delhaize has quietly become one of the most formidable e-commerce players in the food retail industry. Its Q1 2026 results make that case compellingly. Group online sales reached €2.6 billion in the first quarter, up 8.3% at constant exchange rates. Net consumer …
New York City is in the thick of a landmark policy battle over last-mile delivery regulation. The city administration has officially endorsed a City Council bill that would require e-commerce companies to directly hire and pay delivery workers, drawing fierce opposition from an Amazon-backed coalition. The bill would force companies to directly employ delivery workers, …
A major peer-reviewed study published this week in Nature Cities maps last-mile delivery emissions across 365 Chinese cities using data from 14 billion orders and 1.9 million couriers. The research finds that order growth does not translate proportionally into emissions: an 83.5% increase in orders from 2023 to 2024 resulted in only a 31.3% rise …
Amazon Supply Chain Services Opens Its Logistics Network to Third Parties. Are the concerns of UPS, FedEx, and DHL shareholders justified? Amazon has announced Amazon Supply Chain Services (ASCS): a full opening of its logistics network to any business, not just its own marketplace sellers. UPS lost more than 10% in a single day. FedEx …
Scroll through any academic journal on city logistics, and you will find the same framing: how do we scale out-of-home delivery systems to keep pace with the rapid growth of e-commerce? It is an important-sounding question. It is also, increasingly, the wrong one. The inconvenient truth is this: e-commerce is no longer growing the way …
Amazon’s first quarter 2026 results reveal a company investing heavily in its physical logistics infrastructure, even as that spending compresses free cash flow to near zero. The obsession with improving customers’ lives every day comes at a cost. A big one. Scale and speed Total net product sales reached $296 billion, up by almost 9% …
From 29 April 2026, Boon’s Dagmarkt in the heart of Utrecht will be supplied by an electric boat. No more delivery trucks through the city center, no emissions, no vibrations beneath the historic vaulted cellars. Just goods delivered by water, as Utrecht did for centuries, but now emission-free. It sounds almost obvious. Yet this is …
DHL is expanding its pioneering water-based delivery project in Berlin, launching a second solar-powered ship route along the Spree. The new route runs from Köpenick through several stops — including Rummelsburg Bay — to the Osthafen near the Oberbaumbrücke, with solar-powered DHL parcel stations at each stop. The first solar ship has been operating between …
Failed deliveries are one of the most stubborn headaches in urban logistics. The courier arrives, nobody’s home, and the whole costly cycle begins again: a second attempt, extra fuel, more emissions, and a frustrated customer. A new study published in Research in Transportation Economics (Escudero-Santana et al., 2026) takes a fresh angle on this problem: …
PostNL opened 2026 with a notable shift in its e-commerce operations: total parcel volume dropped 7.1% compared to the same quarter last year. Yet the company made this choice deliberately. So what’s going on? Fewer parcels, but worth more Revenue from the e-commerce segment came in at €451 million, down from €473 million in Q1 …