Retailers and the Excel crunch.
With e-commerce booming, retailers are grappling with millions of data points daily, creating an Excel crunch.
While Excel has been a trusty tool for decades, the sheer scale of operations in today’s shipping landscape is pushing its limits. How quickly are we maxing out spreadsheets? Let’s dive into the numbers and explore the implications for the retail industry.
The UK’s e-commerce sector is one of the most vibrant in the world, with millions of orders flowing through the system daily. Each shipment generates data: addresses, tracking numbers, costs, billing information and customer details. Managing this data on spreadsheets might seem practical, but the numbers reveal otherwise.
E-commerce in the UK handles approximately 4 billion parcels annually, with a significant portion related to last-mile delivery.
That’s over 10.9 million shipments per day!
How quickly are we maxing out spreadsheets?
With Excel’s capacity maxed at 1,048,576 rows, let's take a look at a typical large e-commerce organisation to understand and give context to the Excel crunch many retailers are experiencing.
Case Study: Large E-commerce business
They processed approximately 83.7 million orders in 2023.
This averages to about 229,000 orders per day.
Spreadsheet Impact: At this rate, they max out an Excel sheet in just 4.6 days.
In a year, they would generate 80 full spreadsheets just for tracking shipments.
Implications: Every additional dataset (returns, customer queries, or payment discrepancies) adds another layer of complexity, rendering Excel even more inadequate.
To help you find where you land:
Daily shipments = Days to max out an Excel spreadsheet
150,000 = 7 days
100,000 = 10 days
50,000 = 21 days
25,000 = 42 days
Case Study: Medium-sized retailer
A medium-sized retailer processing around 12,580 orders daily would fill an Excel sheet every 83 days.
They’d use about 4 spreadsheets annually, a seemingly manageable load—until you factor in error rates, returns, and scalability needs.
Excel is no longer enough
The sheer scale of retail operations today makes Excel a bottleneck. While it’s a powerful tool for small-scale tasks, it simply wasn’t designed to handle the dynamic, high-volume data needs of modern retail logistics.
Data Overload: Spreadsheets struggle with performance long before hitting the row limit, slowing down workflows.
Error Management: Manually cross-referencing invoices and shipments is time-consuming. For instance, a team of 20 would take 3.6 months to manually check two full Excel spreadsheets of 1 million rows each, which isn’t feasible for most retailers.
Scalability Issues: As businesses grow, relying on static tools like Excel to manage their last-mile shipments hinders scalability, introducing inefficiencies and increasing costs.
Data management tools must keep pace with the requirements of the industry. While Excel has served businesses well, the numbers don’t lie—tracking millions of shipments is maxing out its capabilities. By transitioning to smarter tools, retailers can minimise errors, reduce costs, and unlock efficiency gains.
Is your business ready to move beyond Excel? The cost of sticking with outdated solutions is growing, and the opportunities for innovation are too big to ignore.
