A Practical Order Assignment Method to Affiliated Stores Using Huff's Model

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a steady year-on-year increase in the benefits that consumers derive from products and services via e-commerce platforms. Specifically, there are e-commerce companies that operate by assigning customer orders to affiliated stores within their platform. In this sales model, it is still common for operators to manually assign orders to affiliated stores. In this study, we developed a method that automatically and dynamically assigns orders based on store scale while considering the efficient distribution of orders to minimize delivery distances. The scale of the stores was quantified using Huff's model. Numerical experiments were conducted using real data from e-commerce companies. The results indicate that the proposed method showed better performance than that of the operators in terms of delivery distance. Furthermore, the proposed method outperformed previous research in terms of the balance of orders at each store. In conclusion, the proposed method offers a more practical approach compared to previous research.