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1. Introduction
In recent years, the development of global e-commerce has attracted many consumers toward purchases on the internet. The Market Intelligence and Consulting Institute’s (MIC) (2017) survey shows that Taiwanese consumers’ spending on online shopping has continued to rise in recent years, from $21,681 per person in 2014 to $27,715 per person in 2016, approximately a 28 per cent growth. The growth of e-commerce enhanced the development of the logistics industry because of heavy shipping requirements of goods. This development originated with home delivery and has now progressed to newer types of delivery, such as convenience store delivery, where consumers can pick up their goods any time, 24 h a day, 7 days a week. Although this method increases the consumer’s convenience with regard to picking up goods, it also increases the workload of convenience store staff. In addition, according to Ipsos’ survey (Lo, 2017) on the logistics industry, 20 per cent of home deliveries were repeat deliveries because nobody was at home. Some people choose home delivery services but do not know the exact time of delivery by the logistics service provider. Hence, the staff of the logistics company will deliver the goods repeatedly. This phenomenon is called repeat delivery and increases the costs for logistics companies. Therefore, most logistics companies try to find a solution to this problem. The use of a smart locker is one of the solutions. According to its definition, a smart locker is a type of self-service technology (SST). According to Meuter et al. (2000), “customers can use this technology to complete services without staff members.” It has been applied to various industries for providing better services (Tung and Law, 2017; Shin and Perdue, 2019; Ku and Chen, 2013; Lu et al., 2009; Liljander et al., 2006). The logistics industry is no exception.
Smart locker is a type of smart service which uses information technology to support logistic service in our daily life. For example, it can be used for borrowing and returning books at a library. It can also be applied to support self-service of logistics. Customer can ship or pick up their goods by themselves without service time or place restrictions. Additionally, it can be used with information technology for collecting operating data for advanced analysis,...