People will pay more and settle for less if delivery is fast
Fast delivery can change where people shop, reduce competition, and help nearby businesses win more customers online.
Online shopping offers a long list of sellers, prices, and products, but every order also comes with a wait. That delay may shape consumer choice more strongly than many businesses realize.
An analysis of pizza delivery found that people often favored the seller that could reach them fastest, even when other shops offered lower prices or higher estimated quality.
Faster delivery does not always widen competition, because impatience can divide a city into small local markets and protect nearby businesses from distant rivals.
Waiting changes consumer choices
Consumer impatience, as the authors use the term, simply means the desire to receive an order sooner. The term describes the value people place on time.
The team asked how much consumers valued shorter waits and how that preference changed competition. They also tested how new delivery technology might alter the market.
Most customers choose nearby pizzerias
The paper examined 97,552 orders placed from September 2010 through July 2011 in a major northern Italian city.
The sample included 6,851 repeat customers and 51 independently owned pizzerias on one online platform.
The chosen pizzeria was usually about 1.1 miles (1.7 kilometers) away, and an order arrived in roughly 35 minutes.
About two thirds of orders went to shops within 1.2 miles (two kilometers), while only 1.3% came from more than 3.1 miles (five kilometers) away.
Address changes helped the team test whether distance itself drove these choices.
Expected delivery time matters
Once a customer moved more than 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) from a previously favored pizzeria, nearly 80% switched to another shop.
Before moving, 31% of customers switched to a different pizzeria when placing their next order. After moving, that figure jumped to 82% on their first order from the new location.
The sudden jump did not fit neighborhood familiarity or rare local advertising.
The platform listed pizzerias from nearest to farthest. After the team accounted for distance, list position had little clear effect, supporting the idea that expected delivery time drove much of the change.
Slow delivery protects nearby pizzerias
The researchers built a computer model that estimated how each person weighed price, waiting time, and a pizzeria’s overall appeal.
For the middle consumer, 50% faster delivery was worth more than 20% of the order price, although values ranged from about 14% to 30% across consumer groups.
“Our findings challenge the common assumption that faster delivery simply intensifies rivalry,” said Chaewon Seol of Purdue University.
“Instead, impatience fragments the market, protecting lower-quality providers that rely on proximity while limiting the reach of higher-quality ones.”
Fast delivery reshapes markets
Because a price cut affected nearby shops more than faraway ones, the model suggested that impatience reduced pressure from distant competitors.
When the team used the model to test delivery time cuts from 25% to 100%, moderate cuts first weakened some central pizzerias’ location advantage and let suburban shops reach more customers.
“When delivery time falls by more than 75%, the pattern reverses: market share concentrates among high-quality pizzerias, and many low- and mid-quality establishments exit,” noted Federico Rossi of Purdue University.
“This is because proximity to the customer is no longer an advantage for some of those lower-quality sellers.”
When quality starts to win
The paper did not measure quality through taste tests or ratings. Instead, the model treated quality as the part of a pizzeria’s appeal that remained after accounting for price, time, and other observed differences.
With delivery time cut by 75% and technology costs equal to 10% of the menu price, estimated profits rose 52% for the highest quality group and fell 16% for the lowest quality group.
These were model results, not changes observed in real businesses.
The team assumed that a pizzeria would close after losing at least 30% of its profit.
Under that rule, the model predicted that about 45% of downtown pizzerias would leave, compared with 10% in the inner ring and none in the suburbs.
Platforms can price impatience
A second simulation tested a premium option that cut delivery time by 10% and charged an extra fee equal to 10% of the menu price. When the extra delivery cost stayed fixed, estimated platform profit rose 18.7%.
When costs rose with demand, the estimated gain fell. This shows why the result depends on assumptions rather than a tested service.
“For platforms and marketing decision-makers, understanding the dual role of delivery speed is essential,” noted Sara Valentini of Bocconi University.
Business strategies need caution
“Strategies that treat impatience solely as a cost to be minimized may miss both the competitive advantages it provides,” said Elisa Montaguti of the University of Bologna.
That advantage can work in opposite directions. Ordinary delivery delays may protect a nearby seller, while a dramatic speed increase may remove that protection and send more orders to a smaller number of popular shops.
The analysis covered one city, one kind of food, and orders placed from 2010 to 2011. It included repeat platform customers, not people who ordered by phone, bought food in person, or used other services.
Several major findings came from simulations rather than a real rollout.
The scenarios assumed that all pizzerias adopted faster delivery, assigned specific technology costs, and used a chosen profit loss as the point when a business would close.
The findings therefore do not prove that faster delivery will reshape every online market in the same way. They show that waiting time can change what counts as a competitor and which sellers may survive.
Delivery speed changes competition
Pizza offered a clear setting for a wider issue: convenience can narrow choice as well as expand it.
Faster service may help consumers reach better options, yet it can also concentrate sales among fewer businesses.
Delivery time can influence prices, shopping patterns, platform profits, and local competition.
The effects will depend on the product, the city, and the cost of new technology.
The study is published in the journal Marketing Science.
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