IB Business Management SL 4.5.6 Place Questions

EkoLogiczne Ltd. (EL)
EkoLogiczne Ltd. (EL) is a packaging company owned 60 % by Marek Kowalski and 40 % by his father. EL is a private limited company. Marek founded the company when he realized that the rise in e-commerce would mean the demand for packaging would always increase.
Originally, Marek imagined that EL's unique selling point/proposition (USP) would be to offer recyclable packaging. However, the eco-friendly market was dominated by one large company, Big Boxes (BB), which enjoyed economies of scale. Marek reimagined his USP: EL would have small factories that enabled customized orders to be fulfilled quickly.
Over time, EL opened four factories across Poland and the Czech Republic. Its customers, which included online retailers and small manufacturing companies, placed orders online; if the factory nearest the customer was too busy with other orders, the order would be shifted to another factory. Many customers chose EL rather than BB for this reason. With growth, however, EL began to experience diseconomies of scale and increasingly failed to fulfil orders on time.
Marek is now considering bidding on a large five-year contract for all the packaging solutions for WszystkoMart (WM), a huge traditional retailer trying to expand its e-commerce presence. The contract would require building a huge factory and focusing almost exclusively on keeping costs low. In terms of scale, EL would be almost as big as BB, the large company dominating the eco-friendly packaging market.
To finance the new factory, Marek would either have to sell many shares and reduce his and his father's combined ownership to 40 % or take a 30 -year loan from a bank.

State two features of e-commerce.