Leading to sustainable delivery options with digital incentives

Online shopping has become the norm, and with it more diverse forms of delivery. Not all of them are environmentally and climate-friendly. Sustainable delivery options would be appropriate. Therefore, the Salzburg Research Association has analyzed how digital interventions influence the decision when choosing a delivery option on an e-commerce platform.

When shopping online, same-day and instant delivery are becoming increasingly common. According to the study’s authors, these are also associated with the highest CO2 emissions. If no countermeasures are taken, the number of vehicles delivering parcels in major EU cities could increase by 36% by 2030. This in turn would lead to a 32% increase in delivery emissions and more than 21% in traffic congestion. The “last mile” alone is responsible for around 50% of the CO2 emissions from all deliveries in Europe.

This was the impetus for the Digital Innovations Research Group at the Salzburg Research Association to investigate. The central finding is that a range of interventions are effective in changing online shopping behaviour.

There is still a lot of work to catch up on.

“The most effective interventions were those that automatically offered the greenest delivery option by default in the e-commerce portal, along with information about the environmental consequences and social comparisons. For example, they showed CO2 emissions, and how many consumers actually chose the more sustainable option,” says study author Michael Thelen. What’s worrying to him is that of the 65 online retailers examined, only two were found to be using proven behavior change techniques to make sustainable delivery decisions.

Salzburg Research asserts that the results of this descriptive exploratory study can serve as a basis for developing effective strategies and digital design options to support behavioral change when identifying sustainable delivery options.

Publishing: Michael Thelen, Veronika Hornung-Brahauser, David Leistner (2024): Exploring digital behavioral interventions to encourage sustainable consumer delivery options. In: 36th NOFOMA Congress “Logistics and Supply Chain Management in a Risky and Uncertain World”, 13-14 June 2024.