Research On Optimization And Coordination Of Omnichannel Decision-Making Considering Buy-Online-and-Pick-up-in-Store

With the changes of consumers’ shopping habits and the development of e-commerce,the traditional sales model has been difficult to meet the development needs of the times.Therefore,many enterprises begin to comprehensively utilize the complementary benefits of online and offline channels to implement the strategic layout of the omnichannel.As an omnichannel sales model,Buy-Online-and-Pick-up-in-Store(referred to as BOPS)not only meets the diverse needs of consumers,but also enables consumers to make cross-buying while picking up goods in physical stores,thus bringing additional profits to merchants.As a result,many companies have implemented BOPS.However,the emergence of the BOPS model brings new problems and challenges to the optimization of ordering and pricing decisions and channel coordination between merchants(e-commerce platforms and retailers).To effectively solve the above issues,this dissertation studies the optimal decision-making and coordination mechanism under BOPS retail systems from the perspective of merchants’ transshipment,cross-selling and information sharing.Furthermore,a new coordination mechanism,Bilateral Revenue Sharing(referred to as BRS)is designed in this dissertation to analyze the coordination effect of BRS on BOPS retail system.Firstly,based on the BOPS model,the optimal ordering and transshipment strategy and coordination mechanism of the platform and retailers(the offline flagship store owned by the platform and the authorized stores)are studied by considering the cooperative effect of merchants’ transshipment and consumers’ cross-buying on the BOPS retail system.Furthermore,the BRS contract coordination mechanism is used to coordinate system members’ profits against the impact of transshipment and channel conflict.This dissertation finds that the transshipment strategy has an impact on both its own and the ordering strategies of the flagship store and the transshipment cost-benefit ratio.When the cost-benefit ratio of the authorized store is small,the authorized store will not have transshipment behavior.When the cost-benefit ratio of the authorized store is large,the authorized store may choose transshipment.And the transshipment strategy is significantly related to the company’s order volume and the proportion of BOPS consumers.Moreover,we show that the BRS contract may not only coordinate the channel conflict based on cross-selling and transshipment but also raise the system’s total revenue higher than the concentration situation.Secondly,the optimal pricing and coordination mechanism in the case of cross-selling of merchants is considered based on the BOPS retail system composed of the BOPS model and the traditional retail model(online and offline).In addition,the BRS contract,the Two-Part Tariff contract(referred to as TPT),and the Mixed Contract(referred to as MC)is adopted to explore the effect of contract coordination under the BOPS retail system.The results showed that although the RS contract could not be used to coordinate the BOPS retail system,the BRS contract could in certain situations.Moreover,this dissertation finds that: The BRS contract can coordinate the system when the margin revenue of the cross-selling is low,the MC does when the margin is not too high,and when the margin is below the medium level,whether to adopt the BRS contract or the MC contract depends on the bargain power of the e-commerce platform.Finally,the pricing decision and coordination mechanism of the BOPS retail system under the situation of merchant information sharing is further addressed based on the comparison between the BOPS retail system and the traditional retail system.This dissertation mainly discusses whether the BOPS model can promote retailers’ information sharing,and the impact of fixed payment mechanism and BRS contract coordination mechanism on the platform and retailers’ information strategy.The research shows that when there is no information payment mechanism,the BOPS retail system hinders information sharing;when there is an information payment mechanism-fixed payment mechanism,the larger or lesser degree of competition can encourage merchants to exchange information.In addition,it can be seen from an analysis of the BRS contract that when the percentage of BOPS customers is high,several contract requirements promote information sharing between retailers and result in Pareto improvements in both party’s profits.However,when the percentage of BOPS customers is low,the system gradually reverts to the conventional dual-channel model,which does not promote retailers to share information.