WEB SURVEY ON E-GROCERY CONSUMERS’ ATTITUDES - AN EFFICIENT DESIGN EXPERIMENT THAT MIXES STATED PREFERENCE AND RATING CONJOINT TASKS.

Digital infrastructures have changed everyday life, thereby helping us to solve different tasks. The e-grocery represents a new barrier for e-commerce, so a web-based survey has been developed with the aim to: reach very diverse samples, intercept consumers’ feelings, understand their perceived value and provide information on real behaviours. This proposal would represent an effective instrument to evaluate the future demand of e-grocery services and the impact generated by these on urban areas. The proposed web survey consists of three fundamental sections: a revealed preferences (RP) one, an efficient experimental design as Stated Preference (SP) and a rating based conjoint task. To help people who are not familiar with e-grocery and choice experiments, multimedia contents have been developed inside the web site and the survey. Moreover to overcome limitations of SP experiments when complex situation has to be studied, the scenarios have been divided in three steps and variables introduced combining images and descriptions creating an artificial purchase timeline that help the interviewed to handle a wider range of variables by solving simple tasks. Starting from January 2019 respondents has been recruited spreading the survey by means QRcode touchpoints and social media.Submitting the survey to experienced consumers and newcomers across countries helps a more realistic evaluation increasing reliability of data. The recursive choice task inside the SP let to evaluate single variable relative weight and its cut off points. Data from Likert evaluation are used to strength the reliability of SP experiment pointing out the existence of patterns and situations that bring decision makers to select a specific purchase strategy increasing so clustering flexibility for analysts. This experiment, representing for an interviewed a complete cognitive process, underlines the potential offered by supplementing data from random utility theory and conjoint analysis to evaluate consumers’ attitudes, expectations and choices. The introduction of a multi-channel purchase option overcomes the limitation to agree or not with online strategy and the “timeline” solution increases reliability meets the satisfying of simplicity and accuracy. This will allow us to strength classical latent class models.