Optimization Of 3PL Transportation Prcing Based On Price Discrimination

Along with the rapid development of modern logistics industry in China, the quantity of 3PL companies is soaring. However, financial crisis brought great impact on world economy, making logistics demand not grow, but diminish. Under this background, the transportation resource redundant problem of logistics companies became severe. The rising of transportation cost and shrinking demand is troubling most of companies and lot of companies went bankrupt during price competition which brought negative impact on the development of logistics industry. So the thesis targets to change the traditional cost-based pricing strategy. Instead, logistics companies should apply price discrimination strategy by setting up different price to contract client and free client separately after analyzing customers’demand data and providing different service plan to these two sorts of client to optimize their transportation yield.The customer market segmentation is the prerequisite for price discrimination strategy. By applying AHP method, can transportation companies analyze demand mode of company’s customers and profit contribution to the company’s yield. Meanwhile, transportation companies could segment their customers based on specific segmentation standard which conform to industry situation and then classify contract customers and free customers accordingly.After analyzing the deficits of typical pricing strategies widely used by logistics companies and several factors that may influent pricing, the thesis propose that besides transportation cost, logistics companies should consider customer demand, customer’s evaluation towards logistics company and competition situation among peers when pricing. The thesis introduce Byes-Botelande model as a basic model and improve it by injecting company appraisal variable. Also, the article creatively proposed transportation pricing model for free customers, which introduce new variables including market average service price and price adjustment. Logistics companies could work out yield formula by combining the above two variables and another known variable named elasticity of demand, and then get the way to calculate service price after having the derivation formula of price adjustment.The above two pricing model are made with the intention to optimize the company transportation yield. Eventually, they are proved effective by case study, and could provide theoretical support to 3PL companies for deciding transportation service price under current fierce market competition situation.