Research In Pricing And Promotion Policies Among Manufacturers And Retailers Based On Multiple-channel Retailing

With the maturing of network technology and the rapid development of e-commerce,online channels are begining to usurp the traditional retail market at an alarming rate. Atthe same time, the traditional retail channels are also enlarging their advantage throughonline channels for firm competition. So, we are in a special time: the traditional retailcompanies begin actively extending to the online, such as Wal-Mart, Gome, Carrefour andSuning Cloud, and other retail businesses have opened their own online store; while somepure e-commerce supplier is also gradually extending retail lines, such as Eslite and Dellhave started to build the physical stores. Multi-channel hybrid sales become themainstream of today’s retail market.Multi-channel retailing, is an enterprise integrates traditional physical stores andmodern e-commerce including other marketing channels to reach customers. In our study,we defined it to include the online and offline channels. As the supply chain is composedof different enterprises from a number of channels, how to effectively deal with thesedifferent sales channels and related coordination problems caused by competition isbecoming manufacturers and retailers managers’ unprecedented challenges. In order toeffectively manage multiple sales channels to further maximize the overall profit, on theone hand, the supply chain leader (in our study, especially refer to manufacturers) musthave a clear understanding of decision-makings from all points of the supply chain andcomplex relationship between its various sales channels; on the other hand, each nodes’enterprises in the supply chain should share information and optimize their own decisionsunder the premise of other enterprises’ actions. Therefore, multi-channel supply chaincompetition strategy research is complex, only with in-depth analysis of the variousdecision-making, can we better manage our supply chains effectively.Domestic and foreign scholars did a lot of research on the multi-channels supplychain.Based on their results, we build a more suitable modern retail supply chain gamemodel for the actual situation. And on this basis, we focused on solving the following problems:(1) in the context of multi-channel, vertically integrated and decentralizeddecision-making have some differences. We expected to find similarities and differencesof manufacturer and retailer pricing decisions in both the supply chain structure;(2)because each channel’s initial customer loyalty is different, and the price(channel)sensitive coefficients of each channel is different, and changes of prices across channelswill lead demand, prices and profits’ change. We are trying to grasp this complex channelstructure, what’s the connection of the individual pricing decisions and promotionaldecisions;(3) we have sought numerical analysis and case study method tomanufacturers and retailers for feasible price and promotion policies.