The Impact of Online Retailing on Physical Shopping Travel Patterns

The shift from offline to online shopping is accompanied with many changes for the retail as well as the transport sector. One of the effects of the rising use of the Internet is that more and more people also shop online and this could imply that also the need to travel to stores decreases. Physical stores are however still in business and trips to these stores are still be made. It implies that people not always as rational human beings that act in a cost minimizing. There could also be such thing where people derive utility from shopping and shopping can be seen as an activity that is fun. This research tries to find if the rising amount of online retail has an effect on transport behaviour. A dataset for the Netherlands is used to investigate this effect quantitatively. The results do show that there is a positive effect of online frequency use on the travel distance for shopping purposes. A different perception of the gain in utility derived from fun shopping could not be found in this investigation. The research as well as literature however did find significant effects for personal characteristics like income, urbanity and gender on travel distance for physical shopping trips.