02/06/25
- Journals
The evolution of consumer expenditure toward online purchasing may have substantial implications for trade patterns, and several studies have found a lower effect of distance in online purchases. The present study analyzes these effects in a broader set of consumer-merchant transactions than previous data have permitted, and at a fine scale, using inter-regional gravity models estimated on billions of card transactions. We use geo-located card transactions to build consumer mobility and inter-regional trade measures, allowing comparison of online and offline inter-regional purchases on a common sample of merchants which each conduct both offline and online card transactions, selected for unambiguous identification of region. Using data from France in the last pre-pandemic year, 2019, we find the effect of distance to be on average 46% smaller online than offline
