Support Your Local: IS-Based Collaborative Delivery Service for Urban Communities.
Toni Greif, Nikolai Stein, Christoph M. Flath · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2020
The vulnerabilities of physical retail stores are nowadays greater than ever. Competition in the retail sector has intensified with rapid digitalization, growing e-commerce retail and fast delivery services. Driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, there are serious concerns that this trend will persist. To support local retailers during these challenging times, we develop a collaborative urban delivery system to compensate for declining in-store sales. Thereby, we enable local cab services - that also face reduced demand - to use their idle capacity to deliver the goods. The initiative is intended to offer a perspective beyond the pandemic. In the long term, the system should enable retailers to acquire new customers within the group of e-commerce shoppers. Since we want to involve as many parties as possible, regardless of their digital maturity, we use multiple communication channels.