Research On Retailers’ Group-buying Pricing Strategy With The Influence Of Return

The development of e-commerce has changed the consumption patterns andshopping mode, more and more consumption happened through electronicchannels. Network group buying will not only satisfy the demand of consumersfor cheap and good things, and at the same time solve that the business cannotafford the high cost of marketing and expand the market. Then how to use thenetwork group guying to benefit for supply chain enterprises, especially a numberof small and medium-sized retailers, has become the focus of research. But at thesame time, in the network consumption, especially because of the group purchasemode of low prices, consumer return behavior becomes more frequent. Therefore,how to formulate retailers’ group purchase strategy under consumer returns ismore valuable.This paper firstly analyzed the two different modes of group buying, builtthe retailer’s profit model respectively, and analyzed the influence of conversionfactor and the first phase of the network group buying for retailers’ pricing, thegroup number and income. With the further consideration of the return behaviorof customers, including the different ways of the service product and entity typeproduct, it has established revenue models of two types for retailers underconsidering the customer returns. Finally, it did the simulation analysis. Thisstudy found that retailers in cooperation with the agent can take advantage ofgroup buying more, and retailer’s optimal group number and income are betterthan that of independent group buying model. And, under the proxy group buyingmode, there will be some customers become loyal customers of offline traditionalretail channels at the end of the group sale phase, considering the advertisingeffect of group purchase.Under considering customer return behavior, the influence of the pricesensitive coefficient of the return and the agent service level for the benefit ofretailers and agents are different. Along with the increase of the sensitive ofreturns, optimal group number for service retailers first increases then decreases,the optimal group price appear larger trend after lower first, and traditional retailprice has been a growing trend. In terms of income effect, the benefit of group buying agent becomes big after small first, and retailers’ income has beenincreasing. With the improvement of the service level of group buying agent, theretailer’s profit is a trend of reduce the first increases, and the agent is alwayslarger trend. So retailers and agents need to analyze comprehensively in actualcooperation, such as the commodities for group buying, the service level andreasonable price.The study also found that the brick-and-mortar retailers can use the returnprice to affect the optimal group number and benefits, so do the group agentswith the use of the service level respectively. With the return price increasing, theoptimal group number grows, but the retailer’s profit appeared a downward trend,and the group agents returns in an increasing trend. Improving the group buyingagent service level can let the benefit of both sides increase, but at a higher levelof service, the retailer’s revenue fall. So, retailers and group agents should takeadvantage of resources and all the factors to establish reasonable pricing strategyin the cooperation process from the overall income.