How Own Delivery Services Influence Customer Behavior and Sales in Online Retail? Building Trust and Improving Delivery Quality in Digital Economy
研究京东自有配送服务对顾客消费和城市销售的影响，发现其通过提升配送质量和建立信任，使顾客月支出增加7.8%、城市销售额增长11.9%，对低信任市场、不常购物顾客和高风险品类效果更显著。
Online retailers worldwide invest beyond their core business of retailing to offer their own delivery services (ODS) to deliver products to customers’ homes through their own logistics network. How does this shift to ODS affect customers’ behaviors and sales performance? When and why do retailers venture beyond their core competence to offer ODS? To explore these questions, the authors analyze 250,055 customer transactions over 10 years across 416 cities and 49 product categories from JD, a major online retailer in China. Using difference-in-differences models, causal mediation analysis, and the synthetic control method, they find that ODS increases customers’ monthly spending by 7.8% and grows city-level sales by 11.9%. This study is the first to quantify the sales impact of ODS and shed light on when and why it works. The findings reveal that ODS has greater value for markets with lower trust levels, infrequent customers, high-risk product categories, and consumers who prefer the focal retailer (versus that of third-party sellers). Causal mediation analysis further reveals that ODS not only improves delivery quality but also builds customer trust, which together increase customers’ monthly spending, purchase frequency, and the number of items ordered.