D2.3: Consumers’ real-time decision-making on delivery options

The rapid growth in e-commerce has reshaped consumer habits, offering unparalleled convenience but also introducing pressing societal challenges. With delivery rates rising rapidly, the environmental burden—manifested in increased pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and congestion—is escalating. These impacts extend beyond environmental concerns to include threats to public health, such as rising noise levels, traffic stress, and safety risks.

CodeZERO aims to help address these challenges by co-creating sustainable and zero-emission last-mile delivery and return solutions for e-commerce that align with consumers’ preferences while being sustainable for retailers, logistics operators, and local authorities. The project intends to provide communication guidelines to engage consumers and tools for the promotion of sustainable delivery and return options by local authorities.

Improving the sustainability of last-mile logistics requires not only that improved delivery solutions are supplied but that consumers demand them. Existing studies, however, suggest that improving consumers’ sustainability knowledge, awareness, and attitudes does not always result in increased consumer demand for sustainable options. While eco-labelling, default-setting, and other “nudges” can increase the extent to which consumers choose sustainable delivery options, an optimal increase in consumer demand for sustainable delivery will only be achieved by knowing how to align consumer awareness and attitudes with delivery choices made in everyday life. Such alignment requires first understanding how consumers make online delivery choices in dynamic real-world contexts, when multiple goals need to be considered alongside sustainability, and when consumer decisions can be more instinctive than rational.

The ultimate aim of the study presented in this Deliverable is to help build knowledge of how retailer communication on sustainable delivery choices should be aligned with consumer delivery choices made in real-world contexts. Building on research in the field of naturalistic decision-making, the study specifically seeks to understand how consumers make delivery decisions in authentic online ordering situations, how those decisions are facilitated or hindered by the online platform interface, and how sustainability can be better accounted for.

This understanding was developed based on interviews with 22 consumers living in or around Brussels, Belgium; Milan and Modena, Italy; The Hague and Groningen, Netherlands; and Oslo, Norway. Each interview comprised two parts: i) Retrospective cognitive task analysis about real-world incidents and experiences; and ii) “Think-aloud” exercises in which participants described what they were thinking and noticing while using popular online shopping platforms. Each interview was recorded, transcribed, coded, and analyzed.

Delivery Choices Have Unique Contexts

The findings suggest that consumers vary in their shopping strategies, in their physical and digital environments, and in their mental models of how delivery choice fits in as part of the online shopping process. These factors interact to form unique real-world contexts that could contribute to an attitude-behavior disconnect, and which could therefore be important to consider when attempting to influence delivery choice by online consumers.

Consumers Evaluate “Delivery-Collection” Options

Delivery choices appear to be primed by consumers’ recognition of familiar online choice situations. Recognition by participants in this study seemed to trigger a set of expectations and cues to attend to, as well as goals for evaluation of delivery options. Rather than systematically comparing delivery options on a set of criteria (comparative evaluation), participants seemed to assess one option at a time (singular evaluation). Participants often evaluated a single delivery option by tying it to a personal collection strategy, envisaging future events to see if the delivery-collection option would work to satisfy their goals. If it seemed to work as part of a delivery-collection scenario, participants would tend to select the online delivery option presented. If it didn’t seem to work, they could modify their choice of delivery option or the collection strategy used.

Cost and convenience were prioritized when subjecting delivery-collection options to singular evaluation. Participants’ ability to control the time, precision, and location of the delivery appeared to be key to satisfaction with the presented delivery option and the delivery-collection scenario it suggested. Speed and safety were also considered as participants deliberated delivery-collection options. Only a few participants considered sustainability, and only then if it did not mean sacrificing cost or convenience.

Consumers Recognize Familiar Features of Choice Situations

On recognizing a delivery choice situation, participants seemed to seek or react to situational features or “cues” that helped them make sense of the delivery choice. Main cues were delivery price, preferred delivery method, preferred pick-up point/location, delivery time slots, package dimensions, return information, payment icons, courier icons, and eco-labels.

Recognition also triggered expectations, both about the online delivery situation and ensuing physical delivery. Expectations seemed to help participants efficiently comprehend the delivery choice before them. Where information presented by the platform did not align with their expectations, participants seemed to seek clarification, generating reasons for misalignment using pre-existing knowledge or real-world experience. Platforms that fail to align with consumer expectations can be experienced as clumsy or difficult to use.

Bad Delivery Experiences Can Influence Future Delivery Choices

Once delivery-collection options are evaluated and chosen, consumers experience the consequences of delivery choices in terms of physical delivery of the item(s) ordered. This then affects how they recognize and make sense of future delivery choice situations. Participants in the study experienced more “bad” delivery experiences in the physical delivery phase than during online delivery choice. These were related to delivery time, communication during delivery, delivery location, returns, carrier behavior, the package, and customer control during the delivery phase. These challenges could contribute to an attitude-behavior disconnect and should therefore be addressed in the development of sustainable delivery options and related communications.

Role of Interface in Delivery Choice

Although participants did not recognize the use of the digital interface as a difficult step in delivery, the following barriers should be addressed by retailers wanting to improve the usability and usefulness of their delivery choice interface:

• Poor transparency of location of purchased products, new delivery options, costing of time slots, delivery costs, and returns processes.
• Forced choice of express delivery, inconvenient pick-up points, unreliable or “unsafe” carriers, or expensive delivery options.
• Confusing presentation of delivery options caused by lack of standardization, distracting information, non-intuitive or “wordy” interface design.
• Missing, inaccurate, or hard-to-use information content.
• Process barriers, such as forced to choose delivery too late or early in the online shopping process.

In seeking to address these barriers and designing improved delivery interfaces, retailers can look to product choice interfaces. Several participants preferred these for their use of pictures and filters. Though not a focus of the current study, participants expressed frustrations with carrier apps used after the order had been made. This concerned lack of standardization and having to register several times for different carrier apps. Carrier apps were a main source of loss of control experienced by participants during the delivery phase.

Choosing Sustainable Delivery Options

The findings suggest that sustainability plays only a very minor role in current online delivery choices: study participants did not prioritize sustainability when choosing delivery and it was not visible in most of the delivery options presented by the 12 platforms used in the think-aloud exercises. Participants were largely unaware of the diversity of challenges that online delivery presents to society. When asked to choose what they thought was the most sustainable delivery option, participants were left to guess at the relative sustainability of the different options. Although several participants recognized home delivery, narrow time slots, and express delivery as less sustainable options, they were unsure about this. After choosing a sustainable delivery option, several participants volunteered that they would not choose that option in real-world situations, because it was too expensive or inconvenient.

In seeking to increase consumer demand for sustainable delivery, retailers can consider the above findings on interface design alongside the following specific barriers to choosing sustainable delivery options:

1. Lack of transparency on sustainability of different delivery options. Most of the cues presented by online platforms address convenience and costs, with few cues indicating the relative sustainability of different options, type of vehicles or energy sources used in delivery, the start location of the product, or the distance it would need to be transported. This left participants uncertain about relative sustainability of different options.
2. Sustainability depends on several factors, such as the carrier logistics, transport forms used by consumers, and relative distribution of consumer choices. This not only makes it difficult for users to rank delivery options on sustainability using pre-existing knowledge, but for retailers to present meaningful sustainability information.
3. Online platforms market affordability and convenience of delivery at the expense of sustainability. Examples of this include “one-click” ordering, free returns in exchange for membership commitments, or “order by midnight, get it delivered tomorrow.”
4. Delivery choice is often the last step in ordering, when consumers are keen to complete the ordering process quickly and therefore choose more instinctively.
5. Lack of understanding and trust of eco-labels, partly due to inconsistent messaging by different retailers.

Addressing the Attitude-Behavior Disconnect

In the think-aloud exercises, participants were asked to choose delivery options as they normally would as if they were in an authentic ordering situation. On discussing sustainability after this choice had been made, most participants became aware of their own attitude-behavior disconnect. They seemed to realize spontaneously that they had not chosen delivery options in line with their sustainability values. Addressing barriers to delivery choice and aligning the presentation of sustainability information with the way consumers make decisions could reduce this disconnect and lead to more sustainable consumer choices.

One way to do this is to consider how consumers make sense of delivery options in terms of their personal collection strategies and how these then align with prioritized goals. Communication on the sustainability and convenience of different collection strategies that consumers use to construct sustainable delivery-collection options—as well as on the sustainability of delivery options themselves—would help consumers evaluate delivery-collection options and potentially lead to increased demand for sustainable delivery. To better account for contextual factors, which could also explain the awareness/attitude-behavior disconnect, research is needed to understand ways in which shopping strategies and physical surroundings cluster to create different sorts of contexts influencing online delivery choice. Demand for sustainable delivery options could also be improved by addressing the loss of control that consumers can experience during physical delivery as well as clarifying the sustainability of delivery-collection choices via the delivery interface.

Consumer Personas

Ways in which different types of physical surroundings affect collection strategies should also be considered when developing personas for the targeting of behavioral change strategies. This Deliverable also provides examples of different collection strategies and consumer sustainability awareness profiles that could be used to develop personas. Consumers’ prioritization of cost vs. convenience can also be considered, as well as their shopping strategy, frequency of online shopping, marketing susceptibility, and suitability of the workplace as a location for delivery or return.