Pricing and Display Strategy for Inventory in Dual Channel

Abstract

Online sales become a large share of commerce and change consumption patterns More and more consumers are using online channels to make purchases However although online shopping has high convenience it has a high degree of uncertainty Therefore some consumers still prefer to use offline channels for shopping To meet the heterogeneous consumers in the market many sellers operate both online and offline stores To form a dual-channel sale which allows consumers to obtain commodities in more ways and achieve the effect of increase the revenue for sellers Hence how to formulate appropriate channel strategies has become an important issue for sellers This study investigates that one retailer operates his own stores sells the same products on dual-channels using three inventory display strategies: no information display offline channel inventory information and display dual-channel inventory information with consideration of the consumer behavior for heterogeneous customers in the market There are three types of customers: offline shoppers browsers and online shoppers We investigate the impact of heterogeneous customers and inventory information display strategies on the consumers’ behaviors of channel selection to find the optimal price of the products in two channels and the optimal sales strategy to maximize the profit Through numerical analysis we found that when there are only risk-averse consumers or both risk-averse and risk-seeking consumers in the market the retailers should adopt the information strategy of display inventory of the offline channel When there is only a risk-seeking consumer in the market the retailers should adopt the information strategy of display both-channel inventory to maximize their profits

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English
Supervisor	Yeu-Shiang Huang (Supervisor)