E-tail versus retail: The effects on shopping related travel empirical evidence from Israel

E-commerce, like many other information technology (IT)-based activities, also offers the potential substitution of telecommunications for travel, resulting in a trade-off between virtual and physical travel. The aim of this paper is to explore whether and how the increasing opportunities for purchasing and information gathering offered by information technologies affect shopping-related travel. The paper will attempt to explore the question of substitution by modelling output of consumer decisions on mode of purchase. Then, this will be combined with clustering the population according to their affinity to IT and finally by identifying the differences in the socio-economic attributes of the different clusters.