The Influence Model Of Alliance Relationships Between Chinese General Merchandise Store And Manufacturer

With the development of market economy and the increase of consumers'living standards, China has been a greatly potential consuming market. Among the various retailing managerial forms, general merchandise stores have made a substantial progress due to its convenience and low price. At the same time, since overseas retail stores entered Chinese market, Chinese general merchandise stores are facing huge challenges. The best way to improve competitiveness is urging powerful cooperation between manufacturers and stores, and constructing the manufacturer-retailer alliances. By good cooperation, the manufacturer-retailer alliances could meet the consumers'requirements in time, reduce circulating costs efficiently, improve commodities circulating speed and finally enhance competitive advantages respectively. On the basis of equality and trust, both parties have to bear more responsibilities and obligations in the cooperation. Only good relationships can impel manufacturer-retailer alliances to produce their functions.The research aims to explore the influential factors and degree of manufacturer-retailer alliances. On the one hand, it is to establish theoretical foundations to the follow-up researches. On the other hand, it is to provide manufacturers and GMS practitioners with managerial inspirations. Firstly, the author proposes the problem statement, research methods and significances in the introduction section. Secondly, she comprehensively reviews the literatures from different perspectives ranging from meanings, characteristics to importance of manufacturer-retailer alliances. In the third section, the author sets about the alliance relationships, conducts the in-depth interviews with GMS supervisors, and surveys the questionnaires to manufacturers. Based on the variables including communication, Personal Ties opportunism, Performance Satisfaction, shared vision, Power Balancing and Special Benefits the author puts forward the hypothesis of manufacturer-retailer alliances relationships. H1: Shared Vision impacts on the alliances positively. H2: Power Balancing has positive affects on the alliances. H3: Opportunism influences the alliances negatively. H4: Performance Satisfaction has positive effect on the alliances. H5: Special Benefits influences the alliances positively. H6: Personal Ties affects the alliances positively. H7: Communication has the positive effect on the alliances. Meanwhile, the research uses trust and commitments as two attributes and exerts SPSS.12.0 statistical analysis software to analyze the distribution of collected data. It further carries out exploratory factor analysis to eliminate the invalid factors and finally sums up the common factors.As the software analysis results showed, the questionnaires'collective reliability of Cronbach'sαis 0.857. Interterm reliability of Cronbach'sαis less than 0.6, while the rests are more than 0.6. Therefore, the structure index is acceptable. Using AMOS4.0 statistical analysis software to test the hypothesis, it is found that the performance satisfaction has the most significant effects on the alliance relationships (parameter estimated value is 0.656), followed by shared vision (parameter estimated value is 0.338). Communication also affects the alliances positively. Its parameter estimated value is 0.29. Both Special dividend and power balancing have the positive effects. The parameter estimated values are 0.144 and 0.14 respectively. The opportunism has the negative influence. Its parameter estimated value is -0.221.Based on the above analysis, this paper suggests that general merchandise stores should improve the performance satisfaction and enhance the communication with its manufacturers. Simultaneously, the general merchandise stores should pay attention to the corporate culture in selecting the manufacturers. The suppliers should ensure the product quality and expertise, make full use of shared information and achieve highly efficient cooperation and coordination for both parties.Due to the limited budget, time and individual capacity, there are such limitations in the research paper as inefficient sampling. The samples are selected from Changchun, and thus the results are hardly applied to other areas. The author hopes that these limitations could be improved in the follow-up researches.