Research On Flash Sale Introduction Strategy Of Dual-Channel Branders

At present,the competition among e-commerce platforms is becoming more and more fierce.The competition of the industry promotes the development of all kinds of emerging marketing models,and the flash sale,which mainly focuses on limited-time and limited-quantity sale,germinates and develops gradually under this background.At the same time,the existence of e-commerce platforms provides branders with direct access to online consumers,that is,market channel.In order to expand the sales volume and extend the sales period,many branders sell goods directly to consumers through e-commerce platforms and become dual-channel branders.However,the introduction of online channel may have positive or negative impacts on the branders’ existing offline channel.In addition,some branders use flash sale channel on e-commerce platforms to sell newly released products in advance,extending the sales period to two stages,which will have positive impacts on the brander’s existing offline channel.Moreover,the discount in the flash sale period will lead to price discrimination effect,which will affects the sales volume in the regular sales period.Introducing flash sale model to sell new products,dual-channel branders need to consider the following issues:(1)when to introduce flash sales channel?(2)what price and inventory strategies should be adopted if flash sale channel is introduced?(3)what impact do cross-channel spillover,word-of-mouth and price discrimination have on branders’ flash slae introduction strategies? Based on the above problems,this study establishes a model to analyze the impact of cross-channel spillover effect on the introduction of flash sale channel.Then this paper comprehensively analyzes the inventory and pricing decision-making under the combined effect of word-of-mouth and price discrimination.Through the analysis,this study finds that the inventory and pricing decision of a brander using flash sale channel is related to the size of word-of-mouth effect,and cross channel spillover effect may lead the brander that don’t want to participate in flash sales to do so,then we find(1)different branders should adopt different flash sale strategies;(2)word-of-mouth does not always benefit branders;(3)sometimes,negative cross-channel spillover effect can provide sales opportunities for branders;and(4)the greater the word-of-mouth effect,the more obvious the negative effect of price discrimination.Then,numerical simulation is carried out to analyze the influence of model parameters on the optimal strategy of the brander,and the results are analyzed to get some management opinions.