匹配不确定下考虑展厅现象的电子零售商渠道竞争策略

Competitive Strategies for E-tailers in the Presence of Showrooming Caused by Match Uncertainty

针对网络零售中普遍存在的商品匹配不确定问题,从电子零售商的视角提出两种竞争策略:建立虚拟展厅和以赠送退货运费险的形式提供退货服务。构建不同情形下的双寡头竞争模型,求解电子零售商和实体零售商的最优定价决策。通过对比均衡结果,得到如下结论:电子零售商建立虚拟展厅可以激励自身提高定价和增加需求从而增加收益,但会导致线下渠道的销售价格和需求同时降低,进而损害实体零售商的收益。退货服务在促使双方提高销售价格的同时,会导致线上渠道需求的降低和线下渠道需求的增加,从而使实体零售商获利。并且当购买退货运费险的费用较低时,电子零售商亦可从中获利。建立虚拟展厅和提供退货服务是一对互补策略,当建立虚拟展厅的成本较低时,可以同时采用。此外,具有低交通成本的消费者比例越小,电子零售商越倾向于建立虚拟展厅和提供退货服务。

With the glorious development of ecommerce and mobile Internet related information technology,more and more consumers tend to purchases online.Products match uncertainty acts as a major barrier for consumers purchasing online directly,indirectly affects demands as well as profits of both offline and online channels.Consumer showrooming behavior arises from their evaluation uncertainty about product attribute.For selecting proper items,consumers prefer to visit offline stores to touch and fell products.To counteract product match uncertainty,two practical strategies are proposed for the online retailers,i.e.,introducing a virtual showroom and offering the complimentary return-freight insurance.After experiencing products through the virtual showroom,consumers can update their beliefs about product's suitability according to Bayes'rule.And then consumers can select suitable products more precisely.Four duopoly competitive models consisting of a physical store and an online retailer are constructed.By solving the profit-maximized problems,the optimal prices of two players are obtained.Further,through comparing the online retailer's profit among four scenarios,the roles of the two strategies in mitigating product match uncertainty and whether it is profitable to adopt them are explored.Results show that both introducing a virtual showroom and offering the complimentary return-freight insurance induce the online retailer to raise its price.And the former generates growth in e-channel's demand,but the latter causes a reduction.Generally,introducing a virtual showroom and offering the complimentary return-freight insurance are two complementary methods.And in the condition when the cost for building a virtual showroom is not too large,it is advisable for the online retailer to adopt both of them.Further,the smaller the proportion of consumers with low travel cost is,the more willing to adopt the two counteractive strategies the online retailer is.Additionally,introducing a virtual showroom compels the physical store to reduce its retail price and leads to a reduction in its demand.As a result,the physical store's profits are hurt.On the contrary,offering the complimentary return-freight insurance even motivates the physical store to raise its pricing and brings in growth in the demand.Therefore,the physical can benefit from this return police.