Shopping-Related Travel in Rich ICT Era: Case Study on Impact of E-shopping on Travel Demand

This paper presents a case study on individuals’ e-shopping behaviour and its effects on transport demand. The developed Stated Preferences (SP) data collection and modelling methodology aimed at predicting how e-shopping affects the number of trips individuals make for shopping, as well as the trips for non-work-related activities in the future. An innovative web-based survey called Information Accelerator was developed to collect the stated preferences data. The respondents were presented with realistic scenarios in year 2010 and stated the number of e-shopping trips they would conduct in the future. These SP scenarios included attributes related to the future level of service of transport system, as well as internet-related characteristics such as connection speed, connection fee, security of transactions payment and product delivery issues. A total of 319 completed surveys were collected over the Internet from 5 different European countries. Based on the results, the highest percentage increases in e-shopping were observed for the purchase of electronic goods and computer software product categories respectively, while the smallest increase found corresponds to leisure products. Substitution of in-store shopping trips with e-shopping was found prominent for specific product categories (especially grocery products). However, the number of trips for other than shopping and work trip purposes (such as leisure trips) was not influenced by e-shopping. A regression model was estimated to forecast the difference in the number of daily trips for shopping as a function of both scenario variables (e.g. problems with credit cards solved, internet connection free or faster, etc.), journey conditions, and individual-specific variables (age, gender, occupation, etc.). Estimation results show that some consumer categories (such as young individuals, workers familiar with the internet), are more likely to perform e-shopping. Estimation results also demonstrate that the technological improvements having the greatest effects on the increase of e-shopping (and on the consequent decrease of shopping trips), are those related to overcoming delivery and security problem