What Young E-Consumers Want? Forecasting Parcel Lockers Choice in Rome

Abstract

Surges in e-commerce sales represent a huge challenge for urban freight transport. Parcel lockers constitute a valid solution for addressing the challenges home deliveries imply. In fact, eliminating courier–consumer contact (also relevant for health-related issues, as made evident by the COVID-19 pandemic) and delivering in fewer predefined places might help coping mechanisms for missed deliveries substantially. Furthermore, this option enables consolidated shipping and reduced delivery trip costs. This paper analyses and compares consumer preferences for alternative collection strategies. It investigates home delivery vs. parcel locker use and forecasts their future market shares. This is performed based on both customer socio-economic variables and the attributes characterising these alternative logistic fulfilment strategies. The case study considered tests upon a stated preference survey deployed in the city of Rome. The investigation specifically targeted young people (i.e., population under 30 years) since they represent early adopters. Discrete choice models allow both quantifying the monetary value of parcel lockers attributes (i.e., willingness to pay measures) and estimating the potential demand for this innovative delivery scheme. Results show that distance and accessibility are the main choice determinants. Furthermore, there is an overall high propensity to adopt parcel lockers. This research can support policymakers when implementing such solutions.

Assessing the Effects of Delivery Attributes on E-Shopping Consumer Behaviour

“…Nevertheless, the influence of delivery attributes regarding e-shopping characteristics has been studied in this paper as a novel approach in the literature contributing to the gap pointed out by [8]. Furthermore, privacy, pricing, and promotion are related to the delivery attributes, as shown by [18,20,21,29], who investigated the impacts of consumer satisfaction on their behaviour.…”

“…Several aspects of e-consumer preferences have been studied, including last-mile options [6,10,18,20,26,27], customer-driven central last-mile micro depot [28], and crowd logistics [23]. Liu et al [29] evaluated customers travel choices to collect delivery points.…”

“…Oliveira et al [18] evaluated the accessibility of collection and delivery points (CDP) considering customer preferences and the coverage area. Iannaccone et al [20] estimated the market share of pick-up points using customer preferences. From the customers ' perspective, Hagen and Schell-Kopeinig [28] examined the acceptance and willingness-to-pay of deliveries for a central last-mile micro depot.…”

“…Also, demographic characteristics do not affect customers intention to use self-collection services [26]. Iannaccone et al [20] included socioeconomic characteristics to estimate the demand for pick-up points. Buldeo Rai et al [23] reported that socioeconomic characteristics do not influence crowdsourced last-mile services.…”

“…Next, we used artificial neural networks to identify patterns regarding the effects of delivery attributes on e-shopping consumer behaviour. The use of these techniques brings novelty to this study since the usual approaches found in the literature are discrete choice modelling [6][7][8][9][18][19][20][21][22], conjoint analysis [8], cluster analysis [8,23], the mixed structural equation model [10], and statistical tests [5].…”