The impact of digital transformation on supply chains through e-commerce: Literature review and a conceptual framework

One of the profound impacts of digitalization on supply chains is manifested through e-commerce. The latter has significantly grown during the last two decades, with further amplifications during the COVID-19 pandemic. This has created operational and policy making challenges for firms when deciding about how best to manage the resulting growth in e-commerce. While the impact of e-commerce on supply chains has been widely recognized in the literature, there was no effort to systematically review the literature, conceptualize some of the challenges and propose future research directions. This paper fills this gap by reviewing 153 publications from 1999 to 2019. We classify the reviewed literature based on which supply chain drivers were investigated, as well as, the employed research methodology. In addition, we conduct network and content analysis to uncover the main research themes and potential research directions namely, developing analytical centred; modelling based ecosystem for environment; leveraging data mining to enhance sustainability; balance between growth and sustainability; consumer demand and uncertainty; coordination in e-commerce logistics; last mile alternatives and cost management of innovative technique implementations. Furthermore, based on our literature review, we propose a conceptual framework where we interlink supply chain stages with a firm’s business strategy, digital transformation strategy and performance.