Logistics Performance, Ratings, and its impact on Customer Purchasing Behavior and Sales in E-commerce Platforms

Problem Definition: We examine the impact of logistics performance metrics such as delivery time, and customer’s requested delivery speed on logistics service ratings and third-party sellers’ sales on an e-commerce platform. Academic/Practical Relevance: While e-commerce retailers like Amazon have recently invested heavily in their logistics networks to provide faster delivery to customers, there is scant academic literature that tests and quantifies the premise that convenient and fast delivery will drive sales. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on whether this relationship holds in practice by analyzing a mechanism that connects delivery performance to sales through logistics ratings. Prior academic work on online ratings in ecommerce platforms has mostly analyzed customers’ response to product functional performance and biases that exist within. Our study contributes to this stream of literature by examining customer experience from a service quality perspective by analyzing logistics service performance, logistics ratings, and its impact on customer purchase probability and sales. Methodology: Using an extensive data set of more than 15 million customer orders on the Tmall platform and Cainiao network (logistics arm of Alibaba), we employ the Heckman ordered regression model to explain the variation in customers’ rating of logistics performance, as well as the likelihood of customers posting a logistics rating. Next, we develop a generic customer choice model that links the customer’s likelihood of making a purchase to the logistics ratings provided by prior customers. We implement a two-step estimation of the choice model to quantify the impact of logistics ratings on customer purchase probability and third-party seller sales. Results: We surprisingly find that even customers with no promise on delivery speed are likely to post lower logistics ratings for delivery times longer than two days. Although these customers are not promised an explicit delivery deadline, they seem to have a mental threshold of two days and expect deliveries to be made within that time. Similarly, we find that priority customers (those with two-day and one-day promise speed) provide lower logistics ratings for delivery times longer than their anticipated delivery date. We estimate that reducing the delivery time of all three-day delivered orders on this platform (which makeup approximately 35% of the total orders) to two days would improve the average daily third-party seller sales by 13.3% on this platform. The impact of delivery time performance on sales is more significant for sellers with a higher percentage of three-day delivered orders and a higher spend per order. Managerial Implications: Our study emphasizes that delivery performance and logistics ratings, which measure service quality, are essential drivers of the customer purchase decision on e-commerce platforms. Further, by quantifying the impact of delivery time performance on sales, our study also provides a framework for online retailers to assess if the increase in sales due to improved logistics performance can offset the increase in additional infrastructure costs required for faster deliveries. Our study’s insights are relevant to third-party sellers and e-commerce platform managers who aim to improve long-term online customer traffic and sales.