Abstract
In recent years, customer pick-up at collection and delivery points has become a popular alternative to traditional home delivery, which is under great pressure. However, current service of pick-up facilities has seldom been geographically evaluated despite its general uneven distribution and diverse needs. In this paper, in order to interpret the differentiation in customers’ service demands toward reception alternatives and in facilities’ service excludability in different built environments, a two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method is improved to measure customers’ spatial accessibility to pick-up facilities, providing a methodology to evaluate the match relation between the differentiated supply and demand of pick-up service. A case study of widespread automated parcel stations (APSs) is conducted in Hangzhou, China and correlative factors to residents’ accessibility are discussed. From the results, residents’ accessibility to pick-up service shows significant spatial unevenness and social inequity in the study area, which is found to correlate most to residences’ maintenance management. As well-managed, gated communities generally hold effective access to exclusive services, most open communities and self-built, single houses are in need of improvement due to inadequate service stemming from a high aging rate, lack of property management, and low service availability of nonexclusive facilities in open areas.
Highlights
There has been considerable expansion of e-commerce all over the world in recent years
To solve last-mile problems, researchers, institutions, e-commerce companies (ECs), logistics service providers (LSPs), community service providers (CSPs), and many other stakeholders have eagerly worked together for decades and come up with diverse innovations relating to delivery routing, vehicles, and reception alternatives [7,8]
From the results, 3 parameters showed no obvious relationship with each other but an obvious connection with gender and age: 1. No significant difference in reception frequency was found between genders; average weekly reception generally decreased with an increase in age
Summary
There has been considerable expansion of e-commerce all over the world in recent years. A few researchers have studied the spatial distribution of pick-up services [18,26,27], but mostly under the assumption of homogeneous service and demand for all last-mile alternatives This is despite great differences among customers’ service preferences [28,29] and existing service exclusiveness at certain areas, which can lead to problems such as demand overestimation, low utilization, improper design of service network [30,31], and customer dissatisfaction [32,33].
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