Our paper on how U.S. grocery chains decide which stores offer online pickup and delivery is now published in the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research (open access, CC BY). It is joint work with Connor Reed at Meijer and my colleague Mark Sallos at the American University of Sharjah, and it was funded by an AUS faculty research grant.

Abstract

Supermarket chains must decide whether individual stores will offer pickup, delivery, both services, or neither. While consumer preferences for e-commerce features are well studied, the firm-level and store-level decisions that drive channel offerings remain underexplored. We analyze an augmented dataset of market, demographic, spatial and e-commerce information, assembled from three proprietary sources, covering 14,275 grocery stores in the United States. We use a spatial multinomial generalized additive model (GAM) to predict the offered configuration at the store level, benchmarked against elastic net multinomial regression and random forest models, and find that spatial GAM achieved a macro ROC AUC near that of the random forest (0.873 vs. 0.896), while having the strongest balanced accuracy across configurations (0.568). The banner was the most important predictor across all model families, while other important factors include the store type and demographic variables like historical population growth, education levels, population density, household size, income levels and geospatial locations. Our analysis indicates that the local market context retains a significant secondary role that cannot be fully separated from organizational factors in determining the store’s policies. Finally, 15.2% of the stores in our dataset have different predicted configurations in models with and without the banner. This identifies stores whose predicted configurations change when banner information is omitted and may therefore warrant closer managerial review.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/jtaer21100357

Article page: MDPI

PDF: Published version

Citation

Harshvardhan, M., Reed, C., & Sallos, M. P. (2026). Where Do Grocers Go Digital: Spatial Modeling of E-Commerce Configuration Decisions in U.S. Food Retailing. Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, 21(10), 357. https://doi.org/10.3390/jtaer21100357