Beyond Incentives: On-Demand Platform Strategies and Courier Engagement in Indonesia’s Crowd Shipping

The rise of crowd shipping has forced online intermediaries that connect senders and independent couriers, known as on-demand platforms, to find better ways to organize couriers with different work styles and motivations while sustaining reliable delivery performance. One of the key challenges is to understand how couriers want to be treated, what motivates them, and how platform strategies can support couriers’ engagement or willingness to stay committed and active on the platform. Current studies, which have largely focused on financial and algorithmic mechanisms, provide limited explanation for this issue. This study addresses the gap by combining a systematic literature review of 19 articles with an exploratory comparative case study, based on semi-structured interviews with 15 couriers across multiple platforms. The analysis shows that platforms adopt different strategies to manage couriers, while couriers themselves highlight fairness, flexibility, and transparency as key factors, suggesting that courier engagement cannot be reduced to economic motives alone. The study argues that sustainable delivery performance depends on balancing efficiency-driven incentives with practices that support long-term retention. The results contribute to platform strategy research and provide practical guidance for managers seeking to build more reliable crowd shipping systems.