The Value of Logistic Flexibility in E-commerce

Shipping experience improvement has been an essential business strategy in e-commerce. Beyond investing directly in improving shipping speed, online retailers have recently expanded their focus on other shipping strategies, such as offering consumers the option to pick up orders at a local station. This paper uses the opening of hundreds of such pickup stations as a natural experiment to study the impact of these stations on consumers. We find that the introduction of pickup stations increased total sales by $3.9\%$. In contrast with past literature, we show that shipping time reduction is not the driving factor in the impact of pickup stations. Yet, the logistic flexibility introduced by pickup stations explains the sales impact. To explicitly examine how logistic flexibility affects consumers’ decisions on purchases, we develop and estimate a structural model of consumer choice. In our model, consumers value two types of logistics flexibility—the flexibility to pick up their items at their preferred times, referred to as the value of preferred time flexibility, and the flexibility to delay pickup decisions to the last moment, referred to as the value of last-minute choice flexibility. We show that the value of preferred time flexibility accounts for $76.2\%$ of the impact on sales, whereas the value of last-minute choice flexibility accounts for the remaining $23.8\%$. Using our estimated model, we develop a counterfactual strategy in building pickup stations that could achieve the sales lift with $56.4\%$–$63.6\%$ fewer stations. Last but not least, using our estimated time flexibility, we also develop a novel shipping strategy without pickup stations that could improve sales by $8.4\%$. Our estimates suggest that our counterfactual logistic strategies could increase consumer welfare by $2.0\%$–$10.0\%$.

This paper was accepted by Elena Katok, operations management.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00163.