A Study On The Influence Of Consumer Return Behavior On Retailer’s Return Policies

Scientific and technological developments have contributed to the maturation of e-commerce.Online shopping is convenient and fast.More and more people choose to purchase products on mobile terminals,and retailers also can realize transregional and trans-time transactions with the help of online shopping.Online shopping has advantages that offline sales cannot match,but it also has a defect.People can only rely on web information to perceive the product.Customers need help understanding the product’s value.To solve this problem,retailers are gradually offering customers no reason to return the product,and returned products can be cleared in the secondary market,saving merchants storage costs.However,on the other hand,consumers will bear the cost of returning goods,and a secondary market will prompt consumers to buy clearance goods,which will seize the demand of retailers’ stock sales market.At this time,retailers need to think carefully and prudently decide whether to provide return services.At the same time,customers’ abuse of the return policy keeps happening.Merchants need to spend extra energy to deal with returns,which increases merchants’ costs and causes certain losses.Should retailers allow customers to return goods if there is a possibility that they will abuse the returns service?This paper takes a retailer with a secondary market as the research object to explore the impact of whether there are opportunistic consumers on the retailer’s return policies.Using the literature research method,model analysis method,and numerical analysis method.Combining the literature on merchants’ return strategy,secondary product sales,and consumer speculation provides the theoretical basis for establishing subsequent models and building a model to construct the profit function of retailer.The numerical analysis rule to verify some research results.At the same time,some variable expressions are too complex to be conducive to subsequent research,so numerical analysis is also needed to conclude.This paper mainly discusses the following three scenarios.Scenario 1: no return service.Scenario 2: Has return service and no opportunistic consumers are in the market.Scenario 3: Has return service and opportunistic consumers are in the market.Firstly,consumers’ return and purchase decisions in the three cases are analyzed,and the influence of each parameter on the distribution of consumers is studied.Then the retailer profit function is established to obtain the optimal selling price and optimal profit,and the influence of parameters on the optimal selling price and profit is analyzed.By comparing the optimal price and yield of case 1 and case2,knowing the retailer’s return strategy when there are no speculative consumers in the market,and analyzing the relevant proposition numerically.As the expression of optimal price and optimal profit in case 3 is relatively complex,it is challenging to directly obtain the influence of parameters on them through mathematical analysis.Therefore,parameter values within a reasonable range are set for numerical analysis to receive the retailer’s return decision when opportunistic consumers exist.The conclusions in this paper are as follows: First,offering returns are not always beneficial to the retailer when there are no opportunistic consumers in the market.The lower the cost of returns,the better for the retailer,who should allow customers to return them;When the cost of returning goods is high,the retailer should shut down the return service,at which time merchants can gain higher profits by improving customer satisfaction.In addition,the retailer should also provide return services when product satisfaction and consumer perception of the value of the clearance product are within a specific range.Second,When opportunistic consumers are in the market,it is only sometimes in the retailer’s interest not to offer returns.Retailers should refuse to return products if they are of low value;However,when the value of the product consumed by the speculative consumer and the value of the clearance product is within a specific range,it is more beneficial for the retailer to offer a return service.Finally,if the retailer provides return policies to obtain higher profits,he should try to improve the degree of product matching with consumer needs.At the end of the paper,the paper summarizes the work,provides some essential suggestions for retailers,points out the limitations of the form,and explains the future research direction.