Factors Influencing Customer Choice of Logistics Service Providers: An Empirical Study
Abstract
E-commerce has grown fast enough in India over the past few years that competition among logistics providers has become genuinely intense, and this has made it worth asking a fairly basic question: what actually pushes a customer to pick one provider over another? This paper looks at that question with specific reference to five well-known players — Amazon Logistics, Delhivery, DTDC, Blue Dart, and India Post. A structured questionnaire was circulated through Google Forms and returned 174 usable responses, covering seven constructs (Service Quality, Delivery Speed, Price Competitiveness, Technology and Tracking, Company Reputation, Customer Satisfaction, and Customer Choice), each rated on a five-point Likert scale. Respondents were reached through convenience sampling, and the resulting data were run through SPSS for reliability testing, descriptive statistics, correlation, factor analysis, multiple regression, and hypothesis testing. Cronbach's Alpha came out at 0.865, which is a reasonably strong reliability figure for the instrument. Every construct correlated positively and significantly with every other, and the tightest relationship by far was between Customer Satisfaction and Customer Choice (r = 0.791). The regression model accounted for 62.0 percent of the variance in Customer Choice (R² = 0.620, F = 54.735, p < 0.001), and four of the five predictors — Service Quality, Delivery Speed, Technology and Tracking, and Company Reputation — turned out to be significant, while Price Competitiveness did not. Taken together, the results point toward a fairly clear message for logistics firms: reliability, speed, digital tracking, and reputation matter more to customers than price does, at least in this sample. The paper adds to the logistics literature by providing India-specific, empirical evidence on how these determinants stack up against each other in a market where customers genuinely have several providers to choose from.