Modification of Travel Behavior by E-Commerce? Capturing Relevant Factors by an Adapted Survey Approach Based on Previous Research

Electronic commerce has grown strongly in recent years and provides consumers with new
opportunities to meet their demand. The necessity to make trips for shopping purposes is becoming
increasingly less important for both the provision of food but also for other goods. Against this
background, the relevance of the car as a tool for the supply for a household can be questioned. It
appears that new considerations are required to broaden the understanding of travel-related needs
of households. Research in this context is faced with the question of how individuals’ overall travel
behavior and a perceived necessity for car use are likely to be modified through e-commerce.
Amongst other aspects, travel behavior research is challenged by designing appropriate survey
concepts. In order to derive a holistic picture of people’s travel and shopping behavior also the
attitudes towards different modes of transport and shopping behavior need to be considered. This
paper presents an integrated survey approach, which makes it possible to capture these aspects
comprehensively. The explorative methods used for this work contain a comprehensive literature
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review, the streamlining of an existing survey approach regarding urban travel behavior and its
extension with shopping-related and psychological aspects. In our study, we first tested this
extended approach and the attitudinal questions in a pretest. Subsequently, we validated the
attitudinal questions with a factor analysis and identified three latent variables: pro-delivery,
technology criticism, and in-store attitudes. The results can serve as input for further studies on e-
commerce and travel behavior.