| While the economy globalization grants manufacturers missions to propose new management models,it also brings them new challenges to product sales,pricing strategies and fulfillment decisions.More specifically,in the process of selling products,manufacturers need to adjust their sales strategies regularly so that the maximum value from potential customers can be obtained;In the process of pricing products,the availability of price information among channels increases with the popularity of mobile payment terminals.In such,manufacturers need to recheck their pricing strategies to ensure the continuous profitability;In the process of fulfilling products,the convenience of modern logistics service makes consumers reluctant to a relative long delivery time.In order to ensure a satis-factory experience perceived by customers,manufacturers have to strengthen the service capacity of their own distribution channels,or outsource the fulfillment option to a more professional logistics service provider.Among several solutions to the above challenges,the dual-channel strategy,including dual-channel retailing and dual-channel fulfillment,has become one of the most popular solutions for manufacturers.Compared with the single-channel format,the dual-channel strategy can usually reach more consumers,and indeed has a natural advantage in realizing the diverse needs of consumers.In other words,the cornerstone of the dual-channel strategy is to meet consumers' differ-entiated needs to the products and services through different channels.Therefore,the advantages of dual-channel structures are essentially derived from the hetero-geneities between channels.Considering the channel heterogeneities in specific contexts,this paper mainly focused on the manufacturer's optimal dual-channel decisions from two aspects:dual-channel retailing and dual-channel fulfillment.Firstly,a manufacturer's dual-channel decisions considering consumer chan-nel preference was studied.Due to the ability of covering a wider range of cus-tomers,the dual-channel selling format has been widely replicated in the major stores by well-known sports brands Nike and Adidas.This paper investigated a manufacturer's dual-channel("direct"+"indirect")decision in a shopping complex,considering consumer channel preference between the direct and indirect channels,with the choices for the indirect channel being reselling and agency selling.An analytical framework was developed to study this problem.The analysis result demonstrated that the dual-channel structures should be adopted when there ex-ists a significant preference gap between channels,which in turn could help the manufacturer reduce the substitution effect between channels.Besides,it disclosed that consumer channel preference plays a significant role when the manufacturer leverages different indirect selling formats.In the case of reselling,the manu-facturer should adopt a dual-channel structure if consumers show a much higher preference for the direct channel.In the case of agency selling,a dual-channel structure should be adopted when consumers significantly prefer either the direct channel or the indirect(agency)platform.Finally,exact conditions were pro-vided in this paper to help manufacturers make optimal dual-channel decisions in shopping complexes.Secondly,the manufacturer's optimal dual-channel pricing considering the external reference effect of the official price was studied.The official prices are commonly adopted by manufacturers to influence consumers' willingness to buy,such as via price tags or suggested retail prices.By employing a game-theoretical framework,this paper investigated the impact of manufacturer's official price on a dual-channel system which consists of a direct channel and a retail channel.Three pricing scenarios were considered:centralized pricing(CE),sequential pricing(SQ)and simultaneous pricing(ST),where SQ and ST are decentralized cases depending on whether the manufacturer puts forwards the direct price ahead of the retailer's retail price.The analysis results show that,under three pricing strategies,the manufacturer's profit function is(joint)concave in the official price and the wholesale price.Besides,as the manufacturer's bargaining power under CE,SQ,and ST decreases gradually,the impacts of the referable official price on the optimal retail prices and quantities increases.Moreover,let the ratio of the total profit under a decentralized system to the total profit under the centralized system measure the efficiency of a dual-channel supply chain,numerical results show that under two decentralized cases ST and SQ,the efficiency of the dual-channel system increases with the value and associated variability of the reference effect,as well as the unit retail cost.In contrast,the efficiency of dual-channel system decreases with the selling cost in the direct channel and the asymmetry of consumers' travel costs between the two channels.Finally,a dual-channel e-commerce fulfillment problem was studied in a data-driven format.With dual-channel choices,E-retailers fulfill their demands by either the inventory stored in third-party distribution centers,or by in-house in-ventory.Using data from a wedding gown E-retailer in China,this paper analyzed the differences between two fulfillment choices-Fulfillment by Amazon(FBA)and Fulfillment by Seller(FBS).In particular,this paper focused on the causal effect of FBA that will bring to sales and profit,compared to FBS,and how the impact is related to product features such as sizes and colors.Let the profit gaps between FBA and FBS denote the rewards for this E-retailer fulfilling products using FBA,the goal of this paper was to maximize the E-retailer's total rewards using predictive analytics.To this end,a Risk-adjusted Fulfillment Model was developed to address this problem,where the e-retailer's risk attitude to FBA is incorporated.The Generalized Linear Model was adopted to predict the expected rewards,while the variability of the reward distribution was controlled.By apply-ing the risk-adjusted fulfillment model on a set of real data,an explicit decision rule was developed that can be easily implemented in practice.The numerical experiments show that the interpretable decision rule can improve the E-retailer's total rewards by about 48%. |
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