Joint Decision Of Pricing,Ordering And Preservation Of Fresh Agricultural Products Under Advance-selling Mode

In the past two years,under the influence of the COVID-19,people’s shopping habits have changed greatly.The demand for buying vegetables has gradually shifted from offline to online.Fresh e-commerce platforms such as Meituan Selected,Taobao Shopping and JD Fresh have also flourished.Due to the short sales cycle and almost zero residual value of fresh agricultural products,it is necessary to accurately grasp the demand and reduce the losses caused by product surplus and inventory deterioration.Therefore,for fresh agricultural products,the combination of pre-sale and cash sale is a better sales strategy.In this case,it is of great significance to study the pricing and pre-sale duration of the pre-sale period,and the pricing,ordering and preservation decisions of the spot period.Under the e-commerce platform sales mode,this paper establishes a two-stage decisionmaking model for retailers’ pre-sale and cash sale.Based on the fact that the deterioration rate of fresh agricultural products obeys the three parameter Weibull distribution,and the consumer demand function is related to pricing,reference price effect and online word-ofmouth,a spot period decision-making model aiming at maximizing the profit of the spot period is established,and the conditions for the existence of the optimal spot price,ordering cycle and unit fresh-keeping cost are proved;In the pre-sale stage,consumers’ time-varying utility function is used to express consumers’ utility about price and waiting time cost at different times,and a model aiming at maximizing total profit is established.The two-stage optimal decision-making is solved by the reverse order derivation method,and the numerical simulation of the model is carried out.The results show that when consumers have higher sensitivity to waiting time,they should adopt shorter waiting time and higher pre-sale price;The two-stage pricing adopts the method of low price pre-sale,that is,the pre-sale price is lower than the cash sale price;Compared with the pre-sale only model,the two-stage model increases the pre-sale price and reduces part of the pre-sale period profit to maximize the overall profit;For fresh agricultural products with large deterioration rate scale parameters,it is suitable for a higher fresh-keeping level,but for products with large shape parameters,a lower fresh-keeping level and a shorter ordering cycle should be adopted.Then,the time-varying function of freshness is added to the spot period model to establish a pricing and inventory model under dynamic demand,which is solved by particle swarm optimization algorithm and numerical simulation.The results show that after considering the consumers’ preference for freshness,the overall optimal order cycle will be shortened.Retailers are suitable to adopt the short cycle multi batch order method to ensure a higher product freshness level,so as to improve consumer satisfaction.Finally,the time-varying dynamic pricing decision-making model under the pre-sale only mode is established to solve the optimal pre-sale dynamic pricing and pre-sale duration,and the results are compared with those under the fixed pricing.The results show that under the same conditions,the dynamic pricing model can obtain higher profit in the pre-sale period.Compared with the fixed pricing model,the pre-sale time is prolonged.In the early stage of pre-sale,in order to make up for the reduced customer demand caused by the waiting time cost,the low price strategy is adopted,which increases the waiting time of some customers.