Optimization Of Platform Supply Chain Sales Strategies Based On Consumer Behavior

The emergence of e-commerce has changed consumers’ shopping habits and prompted supply chain participants to constantly adjust and innovate sales strategies.This paper takes the three new sales forms of live streaming selling,platform advertising and fission marketing as the main research objects,studies the sales decisions such as sales pricing,sales effort,advertising investment,targeted promotion effort,price discount,and discusses the sales strategy issues such as sales mode selection,channel pricing,advertising mode selection,targeted promotion,fission marketing form and fission degree under different sales forms.In addition,the return behavior of consumers and their preference or aversion sentiments to fission marketing are taken as important factors to explore the impact of different consumer behaviors on sales decisions and sales strategy choices.The main contents of this paper are as follows:First of all,the selection of sales mode and marketing decision-making of the platform supply chain are studied in the context of live streaming selling.We establish live streaming selling models with two sales formats of resale and agency sale,and three pricing strategies of same high,same low and differential strategies(SH,SL and D).We further explore the impacts of consumer returns,as they are typically higher in live streaming selling.Conventional wisdom believes that agency sale format can reduce double marginalization and benefit both the platform and the supplier,which cannot be achieved in resale format.Interestingly,our study shows that resale format may become a better choice for both the platform and the supplier when considering the impacts of consumer returns.This result holds in pricing strategies SH and D,where the key driver of sales format choice in strategy SH is commission rate while it is consumer’s low valuation in strategy D.In strategy SL,resale is the supplier’s preferred format and agency sale is better for the platform.Furthermore,we find with agency sale format,equilibrium pricing strategies SH and SL always exist;while with the resale format,equilibrium strategy SH exists only when considering consumer returns.Finally,we discuss the hybrid sales formats with and without price competition,and extend our models to encompass more scenarios.Second,platform advertising has been valued by e-commerce platforms.Moreover,in order to improve advertising efficiency,e-commerce platforms make targeted promotion efforts.This paper studies a supply chain consisting of a seller and an agent sales platform,where the product is sold by the seller’s offline channel or the platform.The platform provides two advertising modes(paid advertising and free advertising)and decides whether to conduct targeted promotion.The seller can choose the types of platforms to register on.Firstly,the findings show that,compared to free advertising,paid advertising can always generate more profits for the platform but might also benefit the seller simultaneously when the commission rate or cost coefficient of targeted promotion is low.Secondly,we find that targeted promotion can improve the profits of both the seller and the platform,encourage the seller to register on the platform that provides paid advertising,and promote the cost-sharing of advertising between the seller and the platform.Finally,we derive that,when sharing targeted promotion costs,the endogenous sharing proportion will hurt the seller,while the exogenous sharing proportion may benefit both the platform and the seller.Finally,fission marketing is important for e-commerce platforms to import new consumers from social media platforms.However,it may bring social pressure,resulting in consumer loss and poor platform reputation.We study fission marketing decisions under reputation-based and discount-based models,considering three fission marketing degrees of non-fission,moderate fission,and extensive fission.Our findings demonstrate that the platform can adopt fission marketing with a high sales price.Extensive fission can be the most effective in improving profits when with either more fission marketing preference consumers or a high sales price,and a small cost coefficient of fission marketing.Otherwise,moderate fission is the best choice.Specifically,by employing reputation-based marketing,extensive fission can always generate more demand,while adopting discount-based marketing,owing to consumer’s aversion sentiment,extensive fission may lead to less demand than moderate fission.Extending models to consider endogenous price,we find deceptive marketing behavior may exist.