Influencing factors in the decision to do online vs. in-store shopping; evidence from the Netherlands
Gao, Ya,b., Rasouli, Sa., Du, Ha., Hofman, Fc., Molenwijk, Ec.
a The department of Built Environment, Eindhoven University of Technology
b College of Transportation Engineering, Chang'an University
c Rijkswaterstaat, Water, Transport and Environment
Abstract
Since the early 2000s, the increasing availability and affordability of mobile computing has dramatically changed the decision context of how people organize their daily lives to satisfy underlying needs and desires. Increasingly, many activities can in principle be conducted anytime, anywhere. This implies that the existing confinement of current activity-based models (ABMs) of travel demand is becoming less representative of actual behavior. Teleworking has become more important in the work environment since COVID-19. Information and communication technology (ICT) and the availability of the Internet has stimulated e-shopping, particularly for items such as music and books. More recently, e-shopping has broadened to include prepared foods and groceries. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to investigate, under which circumstances, people opt for conducting their shopping needs online. A differentiation was made between grocery and non-grocery shopping. In particular, two stated choice experiments were designed, one for grocery shopping and one for non-grocery shopping. Random effect logit models were estimated to unravel the extent of influence of attributes of (online and offline) shopping channels, as well as contexts such as day of the week, weather, how busy a person schedule is that day (among others), whether the person is working from home or at the office on the decision to purchase the required product via a certain shopping channel. The findings are a stepping stone to update the Dutch activity based model (Albatross).