The Impact of a Delivery Option in a Physical Retail Space on Shopper Likelihood

Retails stores have grown rapidly in the past few years. And the growing number of technologies which widely used in retail space. It is the subtle changes like online or mobile shopping options to the retail environment that could significantly increase the likelihood of purchase by the consumer. However, this research debate that because of the addition of a technology purchasing option(e.g.service delivery option) made available to the customers in the physical retail stores, it could potentially influence the purchasing situation. In addition, retailers who provide a delivery service in-store may attract more customers and increase sales transactions. This research aims to investigate whether adding a delivery option - as an alternative to customers carrying their purchased goods home - can significantly change the likelihood of shoppers making a purchase. This research conducts an experiment uses an online survey Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to measure and analyse data by using SPSS. The results of the study indicated that with the provision of a delivery service in the physical sector, purchase likelihood marginally increased, however, purchase methods (e.g. taking items after purchase by the shopper, or using a delivery service) are affected significantly. For example, when there is no delivery service option, almost every participant chooses to take items home by themselves and after the delivery services option was provided, a large proportion of participants choose to use the delivery service. In addition, the study indicated that when customers were provided with a delivery service, the perceived value was higher than those without. Perceived risk is similar between those two groups who were providing a delivery service and those who were not providing a delivery service. Although some of the hypotheses were not supported and were consistent with prior literature, the research is still beneficial to retailers considering delivery services, as this research result shows that delivery services can improve perceived value which is very attractive to customers. Besides, these research results also show that different types of customers have different acceptance levels of a delivery option integrated with a technology device. In addition, this research is also marginally beneficial to other researchers who are interested in studying the effect of a delivery service in the physical sector as it can provide directions and suggestions for future research. This study also provides insight for retailers, in that, providing a delivery service in the physical sector can enhance customers’ perceived value and therefore may increase the competitive advantage compared with competitors. However, guaranteeing efficient, timely and safe delivery is also very critical