Retailer’s Channel Choice And Coordination Strategy In An "Internet +" Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

With the development of the Internet economy,mass consumer habits have gradually become online,and more and more pharmaceutical retailers have begun to re-examine their channel strategies and consider whether to use "Internet +" pharmaceutical channel for sales.If the online channel is used,the pharmaceutical retailers are faced with the problems of high delivery costs and low channel stickiness.What solutions will retailers adopt to ensure positive profits? These problems are not only original and innovative in theory,but also have very important application value.To solve the bottlenecks and problems in the development of pharmaceutical retailers,this article will comprehensively use game theory,consumer utility theory and supply chain coordination related theories,using mathematical modeling and numerical simulation methods to study the above problems.The main research content is divided into the following four parts.(1)We study the channel selection problem of new entrants.There are two choices for pharmaceutical retailers to enter a new market,one is to open a new physical pharmacy,and the other is to open a new online pharmacy.This section builds a two-echelon supply chain consisting of pharmaceutical manufacturer,new retailer,and existing retailers.On this basis,a dual-channel model is constructed for ordinary drugs and special drugs,and then the optimal profits of new entrant under the two modes are compared and analyzed,so as to obtain the decision inequality of their channel selection.Specially,for the sale of special drugs,this article introduces the DTP(Direct To Patient)pharmacy sales model,which not only sells drugs but also provides complete pharmaceutical services.The paper finds that the higher the effort level of the pharmaceutical service,the higher the market share and retail price of the pharmaceutical retailer,but its profit is determined by the cost function of the effort level,which is uncertain.But pharmaceutical manufactuer must be able to make more profits from the increasing level of effort.(2)We investage the impacts of "Internet +" pharmaceutical channel on drug pricing reform.First,the drug pricing reform has a profound impact on the pharmaceutical retail market.This paper builds a dual-channel model composed of pharmacies and hospitals,and uses Stackelberg game to analyze the effect of drug pricing reform on reducing patient costs and diversion of patients from hospitals.The results show that the patients diversion effect of the drug pricing reform is minimal,and the cost of drug purchase by patients has increased slightly.And then this paper adds the "Internet +" medical channel to the dual-channel model,thereby building a three-channel(multi-channel)model to analyze the impacts of the new channel on the supply chain.We find that "Internet +" pharmaceutical channel can divert a large number of hospital patients,and at the same time reduce the retail price of drugs,which has a good auxiliary role in the reform of drug pricing.(3)We study online and offline coordination strategies between the pharmaceutical retailers in the "Internet +" pharmaceutical supply chain.In the context of the reform of drug pricing,in order to reduce the cost of on-site courier delivery for online pharmaceutical retailer,this article has designed a coordination strategy of "buying drugs online,delivering drugs offline",that is,patients place orders on the e-commerce platform and get the orders from the offine pharmacy.To realize this coordination,based on the multi-channel model,this paper designs two coordination mechanisms or pharmaceutical e-commerce and offline pharmacies,one is service compensation strategy and other is profit sharing strategy.Then we separately study the service compensation mechanism in the decentralized decision-making context and the profit-sharing mechanism in the centralized decision-making context,and obtain the decision inequality group of whether the offline pharmacy and the online pharmacy adopt the coordination mechanism.In addition,under the profit sharing mechanism,the online-and-offline same price strategy is further studied.We find that the same price strategy will gradually withdraw pharmacies from the retail market and reduce the profits of the union of online and offline pharmacies.Therefore,it is not recommended that the offline and online pharmaceutical retailers adopt the same price strategy in online and offline channel.(4)We investage remote coordination strategy between the pharmaceutical retailers in the "Internet +" pharmaceutical supply chain.To improve the patients’ stickiness of the "Internet+" pharmaceutical channel,on the basis of multi-channel coordination model,this paper adds remote coordination between the online pharmacy and doctors in hospital.So far the patients can remotely connect to hospital doctors through the telemedicine platform for online consultation to achieve safe drugs purchase.At this point,the online pharmacy cooperates with offline pharmacy to achieve low-cost drug delivery,and at the same time cooperates with hospital to achieve safe drug purchase,thus we have built an omni-channel coordination model.In this model,in addition to considering the delivery coordination mechanism between the e-commerce platform and the offline pharmacy,the problem of online and offline referrals due to the limitations of telemedicine also needs to be considered.The results show that the introduction of telemedicine can increase the profits of online and offline pharmacies at the same time,and the drugs for common acute diseases are more suitable for telemedicine services.In addition,unlike the multi-channel model,the online-to-offline same price strategy in the omni-channel model can increase the profit of the union of online and offline pharmacies.Therefore,in the context of telemedicine,the online-to-offline same price strategy can be adopted.