Is It Always “the Faster, the Better?” The Role of a Nudging-Based Function in the Relationship Between Product Delivery and Online Sales

Delivery time is one of the keys to e-commerce success. Although retailers are taking steps to offer fast delivery services, these approaches are expensive, and they may not be sustainable in the long term. By leveraging a unique shift resulting from user-interface designs on eBay.com, we find that introducing a nudging-based function (i.e., a guaranteed delivery toggle) is a promising cost-effective approach that may ameliorate the relationship between slow delivery time and product sales. Specifically, our research devises three complementary studies—(1) examining the sales impact of the toggle function using a large-scale secondary data set, (2) investigating the underlying mechanism of the toggle effectiveness through laboratory and online experiments, and (3) analyzing the far-reaching impacts on consumers’ subsequent rating behaviors—to establish the external and internal validity and the robustness of this finding. We attribute the expansion of slow-delivery item sales (Study 1) to the subtle change in the design of the choice architecture from simultaneous attribute choices to sequential attribute choices (Study 2). Study 3 reveals the mitigation of dimensional rating bias toward delivery time, further interpreting the nudging effect of sequential attribute choices. Given the dilemma of e-commerce for fast-delivery provision, our research elucidates how practitioners improve their operational decisions to address the last-mile logistics problem by factoring in a simple and free delivery-related nudge.

This paper was accepted by D. J. Wu, information systems.

Funding: This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72101104, 72471106, and 72571259], and it was partially supported by the Soft Science Special Project of the Gansu Basic Research Plan [Grant 24JRZA032] and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [Grant 2024lzujbkyqm009].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.01572.