| With the booming development of online retail industry,the competition between online retailers is also growing fierce.Consumer satisfaction has become the focus of online retailers,among which time satisfaction is one of the important factors affecting consumer satisfaction.In the existing two-echelon inventory system of online retailers,online retailers arrange some commodities in TDCs closer to consumers in advance.When consumers place orders,commodities are directly delivered to consumers from TDCs,which shortens the delivery time of orders and improves the time satisfaction of consumers.However,due to the market demand volatility,stockout and overstock often happened on TDCs.The orders beyond stock level of TDCs need to be fulfilled by emergency transshipment from the RDC.If the distance between the RDC and the TDC is too far away,the order delivery time will be greatly extended,and will decrease consumer time satisfaction.At the same time,the overstocked inventory in other TDCs incur much inventory carrying cost,and even need to be reverse transferred back to the RDC,resulting in reverse transshipment cost.Therefore,it is very important to study the two-echelon inventory control of online retailers’ distribution center to solve the mentioned problems.Firstly,this paper analyzes the status quo of two-echelon inventory control of online retailers,which is to use vertical transshipment strategy to transfer goods from the RDC to meet the temporary stock shortage in TDCs;Then it analyzes the existing problems of this strategy and the influencing factors of inventory control,such as cost,order delivery time,distance between distribution centers,etc.Then it puts forward a transshipment strategy of inventory control,which considers both vertical transshipment and lateral transshipment,and is called vertical and lateral transshipment strategy.Taking the maximum time satisfaction and the minimum cost as the objective function,and taking the transferable inventory at the transfer-out warehouses and the required inventory at the transfer-in warehouses as the inventory transshipment constraints,construct the inventory transshipment models of vertical transshipment strategy and vertical and lateral transshipment strategy respectively.Finally,it introduces the sales case of food and beverage products in East China of M enterprise to verify the effectiveness of the model,and conducts the sensitivity analysis on the proportion of consumers giving up purchase when the TDC is out of stock,the inventory reservation factor of the transfer-out warehouses,the floating quantity of safety stock and the demand volatility.Through analyzing the model and case,it finds that the economy and timeliness of vertical and lateral transshipment strategy are significantly optimized when the TDCs are out of stock and the orders need to be implemented through urgent transshipment.By changing the proportion of consumers giving up purchase,the inventory reservation factor of the transfer-out warehouses,the floating quantity of safety stock and the demand volatility,it can be seen that: the lower the proportion of giving up purchase,the more advantages of the vertical and lateral transshipment strategy;the smaller the inventory reservation factor of the transfer-out warehouses,which means the larger the proportion of the lateral transshipment amount in the total transshipment amount,the lower the cost,and the higher the consumer time satisfaction;the smaller the quantity of safety stock,the greater the impact on vertical transshipment,but the impact on vertical and lateral transshipment is not obvious;the greater the demand volatility,the greater change of time satisfaction and cost under vertical transshipment strategy,while the influence on vertical and lateral transshipment strategy is more evenly.The research of this paper provides reference for the two-echelon inventory control of online retailers.Figure 17,table 22,reference 71. |
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