Research On Merchant's Inventory Strategy Selection And Pricing In Omni-channel

With the popularization of the Internet and information technology,consumers'shopping behavior is gradually changing into personalized and timeliness.Faced with advanced technology and changing demand,companies innovate channel modes gradually.Then omnichannel emerged,which composes of multiple channels such as physical stores,mobile apps,and shopping websites.However,the introduction of new channels will not only affect the operation and management costs of merchants,but also need to change under different market conditions.In such realistic environment,merchants face a lot of urgent problems in the field of channel management and pricing.Taking the rapidly developing retailing and catering industry as research object,this article explores the inventory channel selection and pricing strategies of merchants.First of all,study 1 investigates the issue of retailers 'choices of BOPS and Showrooms strategies in retailing under the omni-channel.Specifically,basing on consumer utility theory and considering showrooming behavior,we establish a newsvendor model for retailers to implement BOPS and Showrooms strategies.After investigating the influences of price and customers' online return rates on inventory management,we compare the benefits of BOPS and showrooms strategy to provide decision support for retailers' omni-channel strategy choices.Three main findings are obtained as follows.(1)Product prices and online return rates have important impacts on inventory management in BOPS strategy.(2)The implementation of showrooms help retailers to expand their pure online market coverage than BOPS,while it reduces the total inventory quantity if the ratio of unit inventory cost to product price in online channel exceeds that in physical store.(3)Showrooms strategy is more profitable than BOPS option as long as unit online inventory cost is small enough.Besides,we find this boundary where Showrooms increases total profit expands with the attenuating of return rate.In addition,study 2 analyzes the problem of catering providers' pricing strategy and capacity management in queuing system under omnichannel.Based on consumer utility and queuing theory,a stylized model,where service providers provide walk-ins,online queuing and reservation customers,is developed to explore the pricing and capacity strategies in the application of Queuing App information technology.Furthermore,we use numerical simulation to analyze the impact of factors such as waiting and travel cost on revenue.Research results are as follows.(1)Restaurant providers should formulate different pricing strategies in different market conditions.Discriminatory pricing strategy can be adopted during peak periods of service.(2)It is suggested that online queuing and reservation strategy should not be provided at the same time.Besides,we solve the optimal capacity allocation ratio under reservation.(3)We analyze the impact of various factors which affects consumer utility on merchant revenue,and give some management suggestions.For example,when customers leave the queuing system due to long estimated waiting time,the provider should stop loss.Besides,charge deposit for reservation.(4)Regardless of the proportion of offline consumers,there are same points that the curves of the service providers' revenues pass through.These results are instructive for catering providers to effectively use capacity resources and make channel decisions in omnichannel.