Retail 4.0: Market area analysis for in-store online order fulfillment services

초록

With the consistent growth of e-commerce market, conventional brick-and-mortar retailers have started to enter the online shopping market evolving into omni-channel retailers. Many of these retailers adopted in-store fulfilment strategy that utilizes store inventory to fulfil online customer orders leveraging their existing physical store infrastructures. The objective of this study is to provide systematic framework to determine store locations and their market areas with product assortments for in-store online order fulfillment. We propose a data-driven approach integrating both spatial cluster detection and association rule mining methods. First, potential in-store fulfilment locations and their market areas are identified based on the online sales volume and accessibility to the retail stores. Second, hotspot analysis is performed to detect spatial clusters of high demand locations for the specific product groups identified in the first stage. Finally, stores desirable for in-store fulfilment service are identified and store specific product groups are suggested based on association rule mining for customer orders within the same-day delivery service area of each store.