Credit: Thomas Wieland, KIT/IfGG
The obstacles associated with shopping, such as shipping costs or the time needed to go to the shop, are crucial to the individual choice of where to shop. When deciding between online shopping and local shopping, personal opinion on purchasing security, environmental protection aspects, and work conditions plays a role. This is found by a study using microeconometric models at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Some of the results of the representative study funded by the German Research Foundation are reported in Papers in Applied Geography and
Raumforschung und Raumordnung.
For the evaluations reported, data were collected in 2019, that is before local shopping was restricted due to the pandemic. "During the lockdowns, local retail shops selling products that are not needed daily are closed. Moreover, voluntary changes of conduct of the population can be observed. Now, purchasing power is shifting towards online business, of course," says Dr. Thomas Wieland, Head of the project "Zur Raumwirksamkeit des Onlinehandels" (on the regional effects of online trade) that started in 2018 at KIT's Institute of Geography and Geoecology (IfGG). In the second phase started in April 2021, the project will focus on whether temporary lockdowns caused this shift to become sustainable. The project will end in 2022.