A Study On Self-service Parcel Delivery Service In Online Retailing

Self-service parcel delivery service has becoming the new arising service in express industry.Different from the traditional ‘door to door' delivery,this service has the characteristics of convenience,time-saving,efficient,etc.Even been anchor the hope by express industry,a series of problems encountered during the expansion process,such as hindered expansion of user groups,costs,fees charging,etc.Many e-retailers have adopted self-service parcels delivery service as a solution to the ‘last mile logistics problem' today.Under the pressure of fierce competition and actively promotion of self-service parcels delivery service from online-retailer platforms,the studies of which factors affect consumer's intention to use the service and optimal competition strategies for those platforms are intriguing topics.This research aims to find a competitive strategy that meets the characteristics of self-service parcel delivery service.The main contents include investigation of factors that affect consumer usage of the service and research on competition strategy of the platform from value-added services perspective.This research begins with context of development of value-added services for the platform and aimed to find an optimal competition strategy.Therefore,the main contributions of this paper are as follows:1.Among many researches in self-service technology(SST),few of them use self-service parcels delivery service as research context.2.We integrate prior research and propose a comprehensive three-factors model.This study combines individual and situational factors and proposes a socialized factor.This research found that location convenience,optimism,innovation,and need for human interaction have positively influence on consumer usage.It also identifies that socialized factor has positively influence on the consumers' intention to use.The test results show that the explanatory power of individual factors in this model is better than that of situational factors.3.We propose a competition strategy model based on the two-sided market theory,which regarding to the context of self-service parcels delivery service.At the same time,based on the findings of Chapter 3,we use the location convenience and need for human interaction as main parameters of the model to study its competition strategy.This paper has some research limitations,such as the test results show that individual factors have better explanatory power than situational factors.However,this does not mean that situational factors cannot explain consumer behavior well.Future research should apply more situational factors that fit the research context to explain consumer behavior and study its competition strategies.