Abstract
The growth of e-commerce has transformed traditional retail, and “omnichannel” has emerged as the new paradigm of a continuous shopping experience through the synergistic management of multiple consumer touchpoints. This posed new distribution challenges for retailers, who are required to design appropriate fulfilment processes to build consumers’ satisfaction and loyalty. The objective of this paper is to provide retailers with insights for the design of their omnichannel logistics strategy, by leveraging consumers’ preferences for the online fulfilment. We explore the online fulfilment process in terms of features, options at the disposal of consumers and logistics solutions at the disposal of retailers for arranging deliveries and return of products purchased online. We investigate consumers’ preferences to ascertain their choices and evaluate their level of satisfaction and loyalty. To achieve the research objective, we conduct a literature review on the abovementioned themes, followed by a survey study about Millennials’ online fulfilment preferences. The results presented in this work consist of descriptive statistics obtained from the data collected through the survey and pave the way to conduct additional analyses for isolating the antecedents of consumers’ satisfaction and loyalty, related to the online fulfilment process and related logistical issues.