The use of location models in retail businesses is well-established, particularly in the grocery sector. Many alternative methods are in use today but the spatial interaction model (SIM) has a proven record of success. To date, that success relates purely to face-to-face activities, modeling and predicting visits by consumers to retail outlets. However, grocery retailers are cutting back on store investments and concentrating on investment in the convenience market and e-commerce: the latter has now reached a 7.2% share of the U.K. grocery market, with continued growth forecast. Although spatial models are used extensively for helping to locate new convenience stores, so far e-commerce has not been built into existing retail location models. Yet e-commerce seems to be a spatial activity. Extensive evidence demonstrates the geography of demand and supply are as important in groceries e-commerce as they are in face-to-face grocery retailing. We therefore take up the challenge of incorporating e-commerce into classic location models. Methodologically, we find the standard distance deterrent term in the production-constrained SIM unsuitable for modeling e-commerce flows: we explore inverting this term and find extensive gains in prediction accuracy, an interesting finding that contributes to the ongoing applied SIM literature.

中文翻译：

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将电子商务融入零售定位模型

在零售业务中使用位置模型已经很成熟，特别是在杂货行业。今天使用了许多替代方法，但空间交互模型 (SIM) 已获得成功的证明。迄今为止，这种成功纯粹与面对面的活动、建模和预测消费者对零售店的访问有关。然而，杂货零售商正在削减商店投资，并专注于便利市场和电子商务的投资：后者现已达到英国杂货市场 7.2% 的份额，并预计将继续增长。尽管空间模型被广泛用于帮助定位新的便利店，但到目前为止，电子商务还没有融入现有的零售店定位模型中。然而，电子商务似乎是一种空间活动。大量证据表明，供需地理在杂货电子商务中与面对面杂货零售一样重要。因此，我们接受了将电子商务纳入经典位置模型的挑战。在方法论上，我们发现生产受限 SIM 中的标准距离威慑项不适用于电子商务流建模：我们探索了反转该项并发现预测准确性的广泛提升，这是一个有趣的发现，有助于正在进行的应用 SIM 文献。