Perspective Chapter: Consumers’ Curbside Pickup and Home Delivery Shopping Behavior in the Post-Pandemic Era

Abstract

Consumers’ shopping channel options have moved beyond the traditional brick-and-mortar channel and into e-commerce channels such as curbside-pickup-from-store and home-delivery-from-store. The COVID-19 pandemic has substantially accelerated consumers’ adoption of these e-commerce channels, particularly in their grocery shopping. Even allowing for the pandemic’s end, grocery shoppers’ reliance on e-commerce will stay and continue growing, calling for an urgent understanding of consumers’ curbside pickup and home delivery shopping behavior in the post-pandemic era. This chapter offers the first comprehensive manuscript to help understand the status-quo and future of consumers’ curbside pickup and home delivery shopping behavior. The unique collaboration between an academic scholar and a practitioner with rich industry experience provides practical insights and points of view with rigorous scientific support. Note that this chapter is beyond a review—a new digital-era shopping channel typology and framework is proposed; a new data analysis that compares the time consumers spend on shopping grocery online vs. offline is conducted; multiple predictions about grocery shoppers’ new behavior in the curbside-pickup-from-store and home-delivery-from-store channels in the post-pandemic era are presented. While the manuscript focuses on the grocery industry, the insights can be applied to other retail sectors that also provide curbside-pickup-from-store and/or home-delivery-from-store services.