Innovations in retail delivery: Current trends and future directions

Spurred on by the transition to omnichannel retailing and advances in technology, retail delivery process has seen many innovations in recent years. The delivery process, broadly defined, is the set of tasks needed to deliver the product from the retailer to the final consumer. Innovations pertain to modes of delivery, locations of delivery, and trade-offs between delivery speed and delivery charges. We attempt to build a typology of innovations and their use, and summarize their potential costs and benefits to retailers and consumers. It is easily seen that many of the innovations can be labor saving for retailers. But there has been little evidence on consumer reactions. For this purpose, we conduct a national survey to examine the likelihood of adoption of a number of innovations in delivery. We find that although overall interest in these innovations is not high at this early stage, there is a significantly large segment of customers who are more likely to adopt these innovations. These customers are predominantly millennials, have higher incomes, and they are tech-savvy, innovative, environmentally conscious, and value quality. The findings suggest that retailers need to be strategic about choosing targets for successfully propagating these innovations.