The Analysis On Relationship Between Behavioral Differentiation Of E-retailers And Price Dispersion

With the rapid development of information technology, the market scale ofe-commerce is also growing, and has become an emerging market across domainboundaries. More and more businesses choose e-commerce as part of its saleschannels to supply goods or services to consumers from different regions or countries.The rapid development of network technology and e-commerce market make peoplethink that compared to the traditional markets, in e-commerce market, consumers cannot only be more convenient to buy goods they need, but more importantly, they cansearch through the network to more product information, including product price,quality, and even more professional product knowledge. However, reference to someresearch by scholars at home and abroad, we find that e-commerce market is not whatwe imagined: in the e-commerce market,the phenomenon of price dispersion stillexists. So-called price dispersion, popular terms is that, at the same point in time,different retailers sell the same merchandise, at the different final price they chargedto the consumers.In this paper, we explain the reasons for price dispersion by the difference fromthe services and its own characteristics of the online retailers in the e-commercemarket.First, this paper, we biult a theoretical model on service differentiation effectingprice dispersion. Supposed that there were two online retailers in network market whosold the same product with different quality of service, and service quality can bequantified for comparison. Through further reasoning, we conclude that: When thequality of service provided by retailers was different, the results of retailers seeking tomaximize their own profits would lead to that their final price charged to consumersdiffered. That meaned, prices discreted.Secondly, we ananlysed the observable characteristics of online retailers withfactor analysis, and identified six basic services factors: delivery and payment,shopping convenience, performance reliability, retailer reputation, information andreturn instructions.Finally, the price dispersion regression analysis. We applied a multiple linearregression equation to examine the reasons for the prices dispersion. Regressionmodel adjusted coefficient was about70%, to better explain the dynamics of pricedispersion. Specifically, the factors of online retailer: the distribution and payment,performance reliability, retailer reputation and return instructions can lead to pricedispersion，but the convenience of shopping and information provision couldn’t.