Research On Inventory Allocation Strategy Under Omni-channel Retailing

The current retail situation has undergone tremendous changes,and omni-channel retailing has become the goal of either a traditional retailer or an e-commerce company.In this mode,users can receive merchandise information and purchase their favorite merchandise at any time,any place,and with various sales channels.This form of retailing has greatly facilitated consumers and brought more profitable ways to retailers.However,at the same time,omni-channel retailing has created a huge challenge for the company's inventory management.The omni-channel sales have higher requirements for the coordination and integration between the inventory of various channels.If the management is not good,the complicated channel inventory will bring cost pressures to the enterprises.Based on this,this paper designs the inventory decision framework under omni?channel retailing.It researches from the aspects of whether to establish shared inventory,how to formulate the optimal order quantity at the beginning of sales,and how to decide the inventory allocation among different channels.Taking an air-conditioner brand under a household appliance company as an example,consider the issue of omni-channel inventory management for seasonal goods.Under this method,the ultimate goal is to reduce inventory costs and maximize profits.This article starts from reality and summarizes the main inventory management modes of current retail companies:channel-specific inventory model(abbreviation:NP model)and shared inventory model(abbreviation:P model).The author established a model of order quantity,and obtained the choice of optimal order quantity and optimal inventory model under the modes of e-retail,physical store and shared inventory respectively.Draw the following conclusions:When other conditions are constant,with the increase of the cost of holding goods,the optimal order quantity of the NP mode and the P mode is decreased.Overall,the optimal order quantity of the NP mode is greater than the P mode.In addition,by comparing expected profits,retailers should always choose an inventory sharing model;in order to cope with the uncertainty of demand,P models must order more goods at the beginning of the season to cope with fluctuations in demand.When the demand is very large,the establishment of independent inventory,the retailer to carry out specialized inventory management can improve the retailer's profit;affected by the distribution costs,the retailer's weighted sales price under model P bears the burden of distribution costs.And because of the demand from both online and offline,the optimal order quantity of retailers in P mode is always higher than the optimal order quantity in NP mode.Similarly,retailers should always choose a shared inventory model.Secondly,this paper compares and analyzes the effect of inventory allocation strategy and first-come-first-serve strategy on retailer's revenue,and finds that inventory allocation strategy greatly increases the retailer's expected profit.Therefore,this article suggests that retailers should give priority to satisfying higher-ranking products that can bring greater value,while lower-ranking products are placed in the later order.On the other hand,the results show that the user service level of the inventory allocation strategy is slightly lower than the first-come-first-serve strategy.This is because when a lower-level demand occurs,the retailer will not immediately meet,but will wait until a higher level of demand occurs to obtain higher profits.