The severe plastics shortage in 2021 has hurt the construction, packaging, and automotive industries, especially the small and medium-sized firms all over the world. Plastics shortage is really a problem with those companies due to many reasons. Moreover, eCommerce merchants have suffered from this issue in many aspects.
We will describe the plastics shortage in 2021 in terms of the roots, its impact, and the approaches for eCommerce merchants to solve this problem.
How To Tackle Plastics Shortage?
Why Is There A Plastics Shortage?
It can not be denied that in 2021, more and more people will stay at home. This trend has resulted in the prevailing takeaway and food storage habits, which need a lot of packaging such as plastics boxes, nylon bags, etc. Moreover, plastic is the essential input of household goods, toys, which both adults and children need a lot on social distancing days. Therefore, the demand for plastic is sky-high and exceeds the supply. As a result, a plastics shortage occurred all over the world.
How Does Plastics Shortage Impact Your Business?
As we have said before, plastic is a crucial material to build and manufacture other products; therefore, the shortage of plastics will cause the scarcity of bottle packaging, devices, equipment, and so on. On the other hand, a lot of customers come to your eCommerce stores and ask for plastics products but you don’t have anything left to sell. For a moment, they will leave your eCommerce stores and look for their favorite items at your competitors’ shops. You may receive many complaints and lose a lot of revenue.
What Are The Solutions?
Backorder
A backorder is an outstanding approach when your inventory is zero. Backorder will allow the buyers to make orders when your warehouses don’t have any goods left. If you use Bigcommerce platforms to run your eCommerce store, a great application for you is Backorder.
To apply this feature to your products, you need to do only one step: pre-set all plastics products to backorder. Then, when all the items are sold out, the backorder will be activated and the customers still can purchase products like normal. After they click the “buy” button, the remaining steps will run automatically. The purchasers only need to wait for the delivery and track it via email notifications.
Pay Attention To The Alternatives
Our world is moving toward sustainable development. Plastic is known as a non-recyclable material and thus causes a lot of environmental problems. Scientists and researchers have invented and found some alternatives for plastic, like sugarcane, bamboo, organic cotton, beeswax-coated fabric, etc. Some companies have started to produce goods from those natural alternatives instead of plastics to avoid polluting the environment and deal with plastics shortages.
As an eCommerce merchant, it would be better to sell some alternative products. For example, sugarcane straws instead of plastics ones, glass boxes, bamboo vases, etc. This adjustment for your eCommerce business will help you rescue from this crisis and earn revenues.
Conclusion
The plastics shortage is truly a nightmare for eCommerce merchants as they lose the chance to sell a lot of products. We have drawn a picture of the plastics shortage in the world and raised some exciting approaches. We hope you can overcome this hardship with our recommendations.
