Inspired by recent innovations in the retail industry, we study an on-demand personal shopper service that lets customers shop online for products from brick and mortar stores. A fleet of personal shoppers fulfills customer orders, performing both shopping at the stores and delivery to the customers. The operation of such a service requires to dynamically offer service to incoming shopping and delivery requests, coordinate a fleet of shoppers, schedule shopping operations at stores, and execute deliveries to customers on time. This paper studies this new problem and proposes three different order-consolidation strategies for service operators. Our numerical results show that order consolidation, particularly shopping consolidation, can significantly increase the number of served orders by better using the available shopper capacity. We observe that splitting orders can further enhance the performance of the system. The results also suggest that personal shopper services increase time utilization and execute shopping activities using significantly less human resources than customers shopping for themselves.

受零售行业近期创新的启发，我们研究了一种按需个人购物服务，让客户可以在线购买实体店的产品。一组个人购物者完成客户订单，在商店购物和交付给客户。此类服务的运营需要动态地为传入的购物和交付请求提供服务、协调购物者队伍、安排商店的购物操作并按时向客户交付。本文研究了这个新问题，并为服务运营商提出了三种不同的订单整合策略。我们的数值结果表明，订单整合，尤其是购物整合，可以通过更好地利用可用的购物者容量来显着增加服务订单的数量。我们观察到拆分订单可以进一步提高系统的性能。结果还表明，与客户自己购物相比，个人购物者服务提高了时间利用率，并使用显着更少的人力资源来执行购物活动。