E-commerce Related Last Mile Logistics

Abstract: E-commerce activities have been growing rapidly throughout the past decade, leading to a growth just as dominant in last mile logistics and urban freight transport as well. Different factors create these deliveries highly inefficient, expensive, and polluting. This led to the generation of major problems that became more dominant in urban areas. Such problems created in cities contributed to higher traffic, air pollution and more accidents caused just to name a few. Parallelly, the concept of sustainability has been becoming more popular and used as environmental concerns on consuming activities are growing. Therefore, this paper is aiming to discover what impacts exactly urban freight transport is making on urban areas as well as if e-commerce customers’ interest is appearing in sustainable last mile logistics. The following research questions are made: “How does the last mile freight logistics impact the environmental sustainability aspect in urban areas?” and “Are the customer's interest and perception correlated with the use of sustainable last mile delivery in fashion e-commerce in Sweden?”. These questions are answered through a literature review and a quantitative survey study that has received more than 100 answers and these were analyzed with the help of the SPSS software. Through the theoretical lens, E--commerce related last mile logistics show highly negative environmental concerns on cities due to many factors such as freight transport, and tight delivery windows. Empirically, the originality of this thesis is that it unfolds customer perceptions and their correlation with the use of sustainable last mile deliveries. The Spearman tests show a significant correlation between customer perception and the use of sustainable last mile logistics through the studied aspects (time, price, service quality and delivery methods). The aim of this study is fulfilled, and the results show that consumers have no interest towards the use of sustainable last mile delivery as long as it is not convenient and suits their priorities. On the other hand, some other factors are shown and considered to be a part in affecting their interest to behave sustainably such as the misleading information conveyed by the companies and deceiving consumers about being environmentally friendly and the lack of knowledge on how to distinguish that the service is sustainable. These results are hopefully useful for online retailers, and different governmental or non-governmental organizations, who are aiming for sustainable logistical solutions, to get a better understanding of customer perceptions. Keywords: Urban freight flow, freight last mile logistics, LML typology, Sustainable LML, last mile delivery.