Harter / Spann Impact of Delivery Time on Consumer Behavior in Quick Commerce

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-3-7583-4704-7
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 14, 160 Seiten

Reihe: Electronic Commerce & Digital Markets

Delivery speed is one of the most important factors influencing consumer decision-making in e-commerce. Retailers have responded by continuously decreasing their average delivery times. This trend towards faster delivery has led to the emergence of a new business model that is transforming online-to-offline markets by providing a new time-critical service: Quick commerce promises to deliver products to consumers within minutes, ensuring almost immediate gratification of instant consumer needs. The main objective of this cumulative dissertation is to provide a better understanding of delivery time in quick commerce and its impact on consumer behavior. To this end, the author presents three independent articles, which are nested in a general introduction and conclusion. Article 1 is a systematic literature review that establishes the foundation for the dissertation by reviewing consumer responses to waiting time in various settings. Article 2 investigates how deviations from communicated delivery times relate to consumer repurchase behavior in quick commerce. Article 3 examines how consumers' purchase intentions depend on both their motivation for the purchase and the product type in question. The results of this dissertation contribute to prior research by (1) synthesizing and integrating existing evidence on consumer responses to waiting times, (2) providing knowledge about the effects of late and early deliveries on consumer behavior in quick commerce, and (3) improving the understanding of two important purchase factors (purchase motivation and product type) that may moderate the effect of delivery time on consumer behavior.

Alice Harter completed her PhD at the LMU Munich School of Management at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in 2024, where she worked as a Doctoral Researcher at the Institute of Electronic Commerce and Digital Markets from 2018 to 2023. She holds a B.Sc. in International Business Administration (2014) and a M.Sc. in Strategy, Innovation and Management Control (2016) from Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (WU Vienna). During her postgraduate studies, she also earned a Master of Business Research (2021) from LMU's Munich School of Management.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Harter, Alice

Spann, Martin

Leseproben

ARTICLE 1:

Consumer Responses to Waiting Time -
A Systematic Literature Review4

Alice Harter

Consumers can experience waiting times across different industries, channels, and even devices. These waits are an inevitable by-product of service processes due to the inability to perfectly predict demand and store service experiences for later use. The majority of research thus far has shown that waiting times have a negative effect on consumer responses, resulting in economic costs in terms of lost sales. However, waiting times can also have positive effects; for example, when they act as a quality signal and thereby attract more customers. Despite this economic importance, the existing research on waiting times is still fragmented and lacks synthesis, thus leaving us with an incomplete understanding. The aim of this research is therefore to provide an integrated and comprehensive overview of the effects of waiting time on consumer responses. To this end, we conduct a systematic literature review in which we identify and analyze 60 publications from 36 different journals in the disciplines of information systems (IS), management, marketing, and operations research (OR). We structure our findings according to the type of customer-provider interaction studied (i.e., on-site or remote) and the examination of reference points (i.e., absent or present). Based on our descriptive results and main findings, we derive promising avenues for future research.

Keywords: waiting time, delivery time, reference point, consumer behavior, literature review

1 Introduction

Consumers can experience waiting times in many different settings, such as in supermarkets, banks, restaurants, public transport, hospitals, online retail, call centers, or while browsing the internet (An, 2018; Convey, 2019; Waitwhile, 2022). This ubiquity of waiting times across industries, channels, and even devices is not surprising. In fact, waits in the service process are an inevitable by-product because demand cannot be perfectly predicted and service experiences cannot be stored to be delivered when needed (Voorhees et al., 2009). In addition, past research has found that waiting times can negatively affect consumer attitudes, intentions, and behaviors, with the effect being moderated by various conditions (e.g., Craig et al., 2017; Galletta et al., 2004). The resulting economic costs take place in the form of lost sales, driven by customer abandonment in the short-term and customer attrition in the long-term (Ülkü et al., 2020). However, there is also evidence of positive consequences of waiting times. Indeed, waiting times can act as a quality signal and thus help firms attract more customers (Giebelhausen et al., 2011; Kremer & Debo, 2016). Waiting times are therefore of great economic importance. Yet, to date, the diverse evidence on waiting times remains fragmented and has not yet been synthesized.

Consequently, the goal of this paper is to provide a systematic literature review of waiting times. More specifically, we aim to provide a more comprehensive understanding of how waiting times influence consumer responses. To this end, we conduct a multi-disciplinary analysis, including publications from information systems (IS), management, marketing, and operations research (OR). We structure our findings according to the type of customer-provider interaction studied (i.e., on-site or remote) and the examination of reference points (i.e., absent or present). Based on our results, we then derive promising avenues for future research.

These two criteria which we use to structure our findings were deliberately chosen for their relevance to waiting time research. First, waiting times differ in two important ways between on-site and remote customer-provider interactions, and thus the generalizability of previous results on waiting times may be limited to the specific type of interaction. According to previous research, there is an opportunity cost attached to waiting (Houston et al., 1998), which is owed to the nonfungibility of time. As such, time cannot be stored, meaning it cannot be saved for a later time or transferred to a new situation (Leclerc et al., 1995). Opportunity costs are typically higher for waiting times during on-site interactions, such as in retail stores or hospitals, because consumers are physically present during the wait. As such, their time is allocated to the specific activity of waiting, with few alternative uses of time. In contrast, the opportunity costs tend to be lower for waiting times during remote interactions, such as in call centers or online retailing, because consumers are not usually tied to a specific location. As such, they can engage in other activities while waiting and thus make better use of their time (Yu et al., 2017).

Furthermore, consumers’ access to information also differs between the two customer-provider interaction types. When consumers wait during on-site interactions, access to information is provider-independent, as consumers can directly observe the service context and thus make inferences about the wait (Batt & Terwiesch, 2015). Conversely, when consumers wait during remote interactions, access to information is provider-dependent, meaning that consumers depend on the information that is given to them by the provider, if any (Aksin et al., 2017).5 Given these significant differences, it is important to consider the nature of customer-provider interaction in order to gain a better understanding of waiting times and, therefore, enable better management of waiting times.

Second, reference points represent another important criterion for reviewing research on waiting times. Indeed, past research argues that consumers assess not only the absolute performance of a product attribute but also its relative performance with respect to a reference point (Golder et al., 2012; Szymanski & Henard, 2001). Similarly, while the presence and extent of waiting times may already be an indication of a product’s performance, consumers may also use reference points, such as their individual expectations or the company’s communicated waiting time, to evaluate their waiting time (e.g., Antonides et al., 2002; Houston et al., 1998; Kumar et al., 1997). Therefore, the effects of waiting times on consumer behavior may be reference-dependent, meaning that the deviation of a waiting time from a reference point may influence consumer behavior in addition to the waiting time itself (Akturk et al., 2022). Despite this, reference points are often neglected in waiting time studies (e.g., de Vries et al., 2018; Griffis, Rao, Goldsby, Voorhees, & Iyengar, 2012). Furthermore, it remains unclear what specific reference points shape consumer responses beyond the waiting time itself. As a result, research is left with an incomplete understanding, which also limits the ability of businesses to use reference points to manage waiting times. For this reason, we also structure our findings according to the examination of reference points.

The remainder of this review is structured as follows: In Section 2, we outline our research methodology, which was used to identify the literature for our systematic literature review. Section 3 then introduces our classification framework and presents both the descriptive and main results. In turn, the main results are structured according to the type of customer-provider interaction and the presence/absence of reference point examination. Finally, Section 4 derives our research agenda and Section 5 concludes the paper.

2 Research Methodology

The methodology of this paper closely follows the steps suggested for systematic literature reviews. While the corresponding guidelines differ in terms of granularity and hence the number of suggested steps (Palmatier et al., 2018; Snyder, 2019; Webster & Watson, 2002), the general essence of the process usually remains the same: 1.) searching the literature, 2.) screening the literature, and 3.) data extraction and synthesis (Watson et al., 2018). In the following, we outline our approach for each of the named steps in detail. This way we can ensure both transparency and replicability of our review.

Searching. The goal of this research is to review the effects of waiting times on consumer responses. Our focus is hence on empirical and quantitative investigations of individual consumer responses. As there are also numerous studies on health-related effects of waiting times, e.g., patient survival (Meier-Kriesche et al., 2000), we restricted our search to business-related publication outlets and therefore included journals from the following fields according to the VHB-JOURQUAL3 rating 6 : general business administration, service and trade management, logistics, marketing, operations research, and business & information systems. In addition, only journals with a rating of A+, A, B, or C (see VHB-JOURQUAL3 rating3) were considered, thus ensuring a sufficient quality of the identified publications. The outlined approach resulted in a selection of 289 outlets, consisting of peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings.

We then used three databases, namely EBSCO’s Business Source Complete, Elsevier’s ScienceDirect, and Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science Core Collation, to identify articles relevant to our research question. Our search strings for each database reflected both the aim and focus of our research. Consequently, our search terms revolved around the following three main themes and were applied without temporal restriction to the title, abstract, and...