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This paper investigates the impact of sustainability information disclosure on consumers' choice of order-to-delivery lead-time in relation to consumers' sustainability concern.

Based on two choice experiments with participants from the Netherlands (n = 348) and the United Kingdom (n = 1,387), the impact of sustainability information disclosure was examined in connection with consumers' concerns for environmental and social sustainability. Information on environmental impact (carbon emission) and social impact (warehouse workers and drivers' well-being) was considered and compared.

Disclosing sustainability impact information significantly increased consumers' preference and choice for longer delivery times, with equivalent effects for environmental and social impact information. Consumers' relevant (environmental or social) sustainability concern as personality traits enhanced effects on preferences, as did priming of environmental concern.

Future research may consider differences between product categories or e-commerce companies' reputation in sustainability activities.

The findings provide opportunities for online retailers to influence consumer choice of delivery time, especially through disclosing environmental and/or social sustainability information.

This study fills a gap in the literature on sustainability information disclosure to actively steer consumer choice of delivery time, particularly regarding the effect of social sustainability impact information in comparison to its environmental counterpart.

The purpose is to explore how the configurations resulting from the interplay of last mile logistics practices and firm characteristics are associated with firm performance in an omni-channel context.

Drawing on configuration theory (CT), the authors use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyze data on 72 Swedish omni-channel retailers.

Four configurations are identified—store-oriented small and medium-sized enterprises (SME's), online-oriented SME's, large store-oriented retailers and large online-oriented retailers. The results show that while offering a wide range of delivery options is necessary to achieve high performance, it is not sufficient, and that returns and fulfilment should be simultaneously considered. For instance, large high-performers leverage their stores and warehouses for fulfilment and returns in an integrated way irrespective of sales channel-mix. However, SME's appear to focus on fulfilment simplicity with less-costly delivery alternatives, where store-oriented SME's leverage stores and the online-oriented counterparts leverage warehouses. Consequently, the authors develop a configurational taxonomy and discuss a set of recipes which provide insights for researchers and practitioners.

The study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the pathways to success, and potential pitfalls, in the last mile logistics context.

This study applies a novel methodology in the field, namely fsQCA, to explore the paths to competitive advantage. It covers a wide range of stages in the LM including back-end fulfilment, delivery and returns. It also provides insight into the logistics practices of both SME's and large omni-channel retailers.

The e-commerce boom presents new challenges for last-mile delivery (LMD), which may be mitigated by new delivery technologies. This paper evaluates the impact of mobile parcel lockers (MPL) on costs and CO₂ equivalent (CO₂e) emissions in existing LMD networks, which include home delivery and shipments to stationary parcel lockers.

To describe customers’ preferences, we design a multinomial logit model based on recipients’ travel distance to pick-up locations and availability at home. Based on route cost estimation, we define the operating costs for MPLs. We devise a mathematical model with binary decision variables to optimize the location of MPLs.

Our study demonstrates that integrating MPLs leads to additional cost savings of 8.7% and extra CO₂e emissions savings of up to 5.4%. Our analysis of several regional clusters suggests that MPLs yield benefits in highly populous cities but may result in additional emissions in more rural areas where recipients drive longer distances to pick-ups.

This paper designs a suitable operating model for MPLs and demonstrates environmental and economic savings. Moreover, it adds recipients’ availability at home to receive parcels improving the accuracy of stochastic demand. In addition, MPLs are evaluated in the context of several regional clusters ranging from large cities to rural areas. Thus, we provide managerial guidance to logistics service providers how and where to deploy MPLs.

Whilst green distribution alternatives for consumers have the potential to decrease environmental impact from logistics, retailers struggle to provide such alternatives. The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of the factors that hinder retailers from offering green distribution alternatives to consumers.

The paper relies on a multiple case-study of three cases, with one retailer constituting each case. Semi-structured interviews with seven respondents and visits to the retailers' checkouts were used for data collection.

The offering of green distribution alternatives is a complex task for retailers, with barriers related to six categories (organisational, financial, retailer-logistic service provider (LSP) market, retailer-consumer market, governmental and technological barriers) obstructing the way forward. A process towards offering green distribution services, including barriers and potential mitigation strategies, is suggested.

The study is limited to a Swedish context, and further research could consider how barriers would manifest themselves in countries with other characteristics.

A framework with barriers and mitigation strategies offers guidance for managers within e-commerce.

The greening of logistics is an important quest towards world-wide sustainability goals, and this paper contributes with an increased understanding of how to decrease environmental impact from e-commerce distribution.

The paper is one of few that takes the consumer side of the greening of logistics into account, thus contributing with valuable perspectives to this scarce body of literature.

Due to e-commerce growth, technological advancements and environmental concerns, developing a more nuanced service portfolio has become a critical issue for last-mile logistics service providers. Concurrently, consumers are adopting new modes of consumption. This paper aims to investigate the potential for last-mile logistics service providers to act as intermediaries in access-based consumption and to revitalise their service offerings through product-service systems – a pioneering strategy not executed in the market yet.

This strategic customer foresight study uses a quantitative survey of 1,000 respondents and an online focus group comprising 10 early adopter consumers to investigate emerging last-mile service models. Potential service concepts were identified through the survey, and two distinct concepts were subsequently selected for evaluation and co-development within the focus group. The research was conducted in partnership with an SME logistics company in Finland.

The consumers expressed selective interest in access-based consumption related to the proposed offering of essential household goods. Young adults and consumers in early middle age living in the city centre emerged as the most potential user groups. Economic reasons and short-term needs were the primary motivations for adopting access-based consumption.

The study showed that engaging consumers in a customer foresight process is viable for SMEs innovating their offerings and demonstrates how the process works in practice.

Documented cases of customer integration into foresight processes are rare in earlier research, and this paper extends the knowledge base through a multidisciplinary examination of future consumer behaviour in the last-mile logistics domain. The paper also expands the limited literature on the role of logistics in access-based consumption.

Operational risks can cause considerable, atypical disturbances and impact food supply chain (SC) resilience. Indicatively, the COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruptions in the UK food services as nationwide stockouts led to unprecedented discrepancies between retail and home-delivery supply capacity and demand. To this effect, this study aims to examine the emergence of digital platforms as an innovative instrument for food SC resilience in severe market disruptions.

An interpretive multiple case-study approach was used to unravel how different generations of e-commerce food service providers, i.e. established and emergent, responded to the need for more resilient operations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

SC disruption management for high-impact low-frequency events requires analysing four research elements: platformisation, structural variety, process flexibility and system resource efficiency. Established e-commerce food operators use partner onboarding and local waste valorisation to enhance resilience. Instead, emergent e-commerce food providers leverage localised rapid upscaling and product personalisation.

Digital food platforms offer a highly customisable, multisided digital marketplace wherein platform members may aggregate product offerings and customers, thus sharing value throughout the network. Platform-induced disintermediation allows bidirectional flows of data and information among SC partners, ensuring compliance and safety in the food retail sector.

The study contributes to the SC configuration and resilience literature by investigating the interrelationship among platformisation, structural variety, process flexibility and system resource efficiency for safe and resilient food provision within exogenously disrupted environments.

An increasing number of last mile deliveries (LMDs) pose many sustainability challenges that retailers and logistics service providers (LSPs) can address. Using cognitive frames (CFs) as a lens, this study explored how retail and LSP managers make sense of sustainable LMDs.

The methodological approach used is a multiple embedded case study. The data were obtained from interviews with retailers and LSPs, supplemented with secondary data for triangulation.

The findings present the operational aspects of LMDs that managers associate with sustainability and indicate that retail and LSP managers frame sustainability primarily as emission reduction. Managers indicate an externalization of responsibility and a compartmentalization of the supply chain, in which social sustainability is not associated with the last mile. Most managers indicate hierarchical CFs regarding sustainability, in which sustainability is an important topic but is subordinate to economic interests.

Collaboration between retailers, LSPs and other stakeholders is viewed as challenging but could alleviate some of the sustainability shortcomings and aid in the paradoxical framing and inclusion of social issues.

A conceptualization of managerial CFs for sustainable LMDs, together with empirical frame indicators and three propositions, is presented, providing novel insights into how paradoxical CFs could make LMDs more sustainable. This approach illuminates the possibilities for how to untangle the operational manifestations of managerial framing and adds to the empirical exploration of CFs in supply chain management.

To delve into the integration of global logistics and supply chain networks amidst the digital transformation era. This study aims to investigate the potential role of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in facilitating the integration of global flows encompassing both tangible goods and intangibles. Additionally, the study seeks to incorporate third-party logistics activities into a comprehensive global logistics and supply chain integration framework.

Prior research is synthesised into a global logistics and supply chain integration framework. A case study was undertaken on Yuan Tong (YTO) express group to investigate the framework, employing qualitative data analysis techniques. The study specifically examined the context of the BRI to enhance comprehension of its impact on global supply chains. Information was collected in particular to two types of supply chain flows, the physical flow of goods, and intangible information and cash flows.

The proposed framework aligns well with the case study, leading to the identification of global logistics and supply chain integration enablers. The results demonstrate a range of ways BRI promotes global logistics and supply chain integration.

The case study, with multiple examples, focuses on how third-party logistics firms can embrace global logistics and supply chain integration in line with BRI. The case study approach limits generalisation, further applications in different contexts are required to validate the findings.

The framework holds promise for aiding practitioners and researchers in gaining deeper insights into the role of the BRI in global logistics and supply chain integration within the digital era. The identified enablers underscore the importance of emphasising key factors necessary for success in navigating digital transformation within global supply chains.

This study aims to help understand individual donors’ preferences over different designs of humanitarian–business partnerships in managing humanitarian operations and to help understand if donors’ preferences align with their actual donation behavior.

Choice-based conjoint analysis was used to understand donation preferences for partnership designs, and a donation experiment was performed using real money to understand the alignment of donors’ preferences with actual donation behavior.

The results show that partnering with the business sector can be a valuable asset for humanitarian organizations in attracting individual donors if these partnerships are managed well in terms of partnership strategy, partnership history and partnership report and disclosure. In particular, the study finds that the donation of services and products from businesses corporations to humanitarian organizations are preferable to individual donors, rather than cash. Furthermore, donors’ preferences are not necessarily aligned with actual donation behavior.

The results highlight the importance of presenting objective data on projects to individual donors. The results also show that donors value the provision of services and products by business corporations to humanitarian operations.

Partnerships between humanitarian organizations and business corporations are important for the success of humanitarian operations. However, little is known about which partnership designs are most preferable to individual donors and have the biggest chance of being supported financially.

Recently emerged Packaging-as-a-Service (PaaS) systems adopt aspects of access-based services and triadic frameworks, which have typically been treated as conceptually separate. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the implications of blending the two in what we call “access-based triadic systems,” by empirically evaluating intentions to adopt PaaS systems for takeaway food among restaurants and consumers.

We derived relevant attributes of PaaS systems from a qualitative pre-study with restaurants and consumers. Next, we conducted two factorial survey experiments with restaurants (N = 176) and consumers (N = 245) in Germany to quantitatively test the effects of those system attributes on their adoption intentions.

This paper highlights that the role of access-based triadic system providers as both the owners of shared assets and the operators of a triadic system is associated with a novel set of challenges and opportunities: System providers need to attract a critical mass of business and end customers while balancing asset protection and system complexity. At the same time, asset ownership introduces opportunities for improved quality control and differentiation from competition.

Conceptually, this paper extends research on access-based services and triadic frameworks by describing an unexplored hybrid form of non-ownership consumption we call “access-based triadic systems.” Empirically, this paper addresses the need to account for the demands of two distinct target groups in triadic systems and demonstrates how factorial survey experiments can be leveraged in this field.