Uncovering merchants’ willingness to wait in on-demand food delivery markets

Jian Liang, Ya Zhao, Hai Wang, Zuopeng Xiao and Jintao Ke

Transport Policy, 2024, vol. 158, issue C, 14-28

Abstract: While traditional on-demand food delivery services help restaurants reach more customers and enable doorstep deliveries, they also come with drawbacks, such as high commission fees and limited control over the delivery process. White-label food delivery services have emerged as an alternative, ready-to-use platform for restaurants to arrange delivery for customer orders received through their applications or websites, without the constraints imposed by traditional on-demand food delivery platforms or the need to develop an in-house delivery operation. Although several studies have investigated consumer behavior when using traditional on-demand food delivery services, there is limited research on merchants’ behavior when adopting white-label food delivery services. In this research, we develop a non-parametric survival model to estimate merchants’ willingness to wait when using white-label food delivery services and examine how various factors, such as delivery fees, the number of placed orders, and average waiting time, affect merchants’ willingness to wait, drawing on a dataset of both delivered and canceled orders from a crowd-sourcing delivery platform in Singapore. The empirical results show that merchants’ willingness to wait has a non-linear relationship with their average waiting time; it initially increases and then decreases with average waiting time. Moreover, the relationship between merchants’ willingness to wait during the pick-up stage and their average waiting times in the matching stage follows a similar non-linear trend. Merchants who have experienced lengthy waiting times on average in the matching stage tend to be less patient in the pick-up stage. This research sheds light on the stage-specific dynamics of merchants waiting behavior in white-label delivery service and provides insights for delivery platforms to optimize their operational strategies and enhance user experiences.

Keywords: On-demand services; Food delivery; Willingness to wait; Waiting time (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967070X24002476
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:trapol:v:158:y:2024:i:c:p:14-28

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2024.09.002

Access Statistics for this article

Transport Policy is currently edited by Y. Hayashi

More articles in Transport Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().