The Research On The Pricing Strategy Of E-commerce Platform Enterprise

In recent years,with the rapid development of e-commerce,e-commerce platform enterprises start to try the similar profit model with entity shops,that is,"annual fee plus transaction commission".People have some doubts about this profit model.Taking clothing products as an example,Tmall's technical service fee rate for the clothing merchants.is up to 5%,and additionally it charges an annual technical service fee amount to 60000 RMB.As for JD,its open platform charges 1000 RMB for platform fee per month,as well as 6%to 8%of revenue for transaction commission.Obviously,Tmall charges a lower technical service fee rates but a higher fees for annual technical services.In this paper we will examine the pricing strategies of e-commerce platform,and trying to explain this phenomenon.Previous studies on the platform enterprises are mostly based on the two-sided market theory.However,those studies only explain why platform enterprises can charge consumers with lower prices,while asking manufacturers for much more;they also explain why platform enterprises with a large number of users can charge more to manufacturer.However,what they didn't consider is why the linear prices platform-based e-commerce companies charge are lower while fixed fees are much higher.In addition,platform-based e-commerce companies just charge manufacturers for using the platform while consumers don't need to pay.This phenomenon has become a potential rule.Internet e-commerce companies concerned more about how to maximize their own profits by asking manufacturer for money.Therefore,we will simplify the two-sided market structure,and thinking from the vertical relationship theory.While the platform retailers are defined as a vendor at the upstream end of supply chain,manufacturers belong to the downstream end.In the past,researches about platform pricing only discuss the situation that manufacturers sell products to consumers,and they did not consider the circumstances when manufacturers provide services.To fit the reality,we consider the case that manufacturers provide services while building the model.Firstly,we build a double monopoly market structure to find out how e-commerce platform enterprises make two-part tariff charging contracts in two cases:(?)platform enterprises have full market forces;(?)platform enterprises have part of market forces.The results show that under double monopoly market structure,if the e-commerce platform enterprises with monopoly power provide technical services to manufacturers without any costs,then in equilibrium state e-commerce platform enterprises will set the technical service price to zero,then charge manufacture one-lump fee which equals to the total revenue of the manufacture.If the e-commerce platform enterprises do not have a complete market forces,then technical service fee per unit will still be zero,fixed costs will always be positive,and fixed costs will be higher when the e-commerce platform enterprises have more power.Then,we study the influence of the manufacture competitive factors have on the pricing strategy of the e-commerce platform enterprises by constructing the monopoly with oligopoly model and the double oligopoly model.We show that the more intense the competition among different products is,the higher the fixed costs will be;and the result is totally opposite in the case of manufacturers providing services,namely fixed costs will be reduced as the level of competition climb.When there is no price competition and service competition among manufacturers,the equilibrium solution is consistent with results of the reference model.Additionally,the optimal price of technical service when manufactures completely compete with each other is higher than the optimal technical service prices in continuing monopoly model.Under certain conditions,the optimal fixed fee in the former case is also higher than that in t basic model.In this paper,two different competing models were compared,and we found that given the same conditions,at the same level of price competition,the optimal technical service prices and fixed costs under the competitive situation of platform enterprises are less than those in the case when just consider the competition between manufacturers.