关键词: 平台, 渠道设计, 批发零售价格契约, 固定补偿

Abstract: In recent years, online retail has experienced strong growth, and many manufacturers have chosen to join online retail platforms by paying commissions to obtain the qualifications to sell their products on these platforms. By opening up e-commerce platforms as a sales channel, manufacturers can expand their sales reach, reduce sales costs, and avoid being dominated by traditional retailers. However, joining a platform sales channel not only requires paying a certain commission to the platform but also can lead to serious channel conflicts and competition for manufacturers due to the coexistence of multiple sales channels. Failure to effectively resolve conflicts between the two channels will damage the profits of the members of the supply chain. Therefore, whether to add a platform sales channel in the presence of traditional retail channels and how to deal with the competition and conflicts caused by the increase in channels are issues of concern to manufacturers.
In this paper, we consider whether a manufacturer with a traditional retail channel should add the platform channel, and take market expansion, channel competition, and platform fee rate brought by platform selling into supply chain decision-making models. We construct a Stackelberg game between the manufacturer and the traditional retailer, where the manufacturer is the leader and the retailer is the follower. By constructing supply chain decision-making models with and without the platform channel, we analyze the manufacturer’s channel design strategy and its effect on the traditional retailer’s profit. Further, a wholesale-retail price contract with fixed compensation is designed to coordinate the supply chain for channel conflicts caused by channel addition. This paper derives several main conclusions.
First, due to the existence of channel competition, when the potential market increment brought by the platform is limited, adding new platform channels will hurt the profits of both manufacturers and retailers. As the increment increases, adding new platform channels will benefit one party and hurt the profits of the other party. When the increment reaches a certain level, adding new platform channels will increase the profits of both manufacturers and retailers. Second, wholesale and retail price contracts can achieve the overall optimal profit of the platform’s dual-channel supply chain (realizing the coordination of the supply chain), but only in specific cases can they simultaneously improve the profits of manufacturers and retailers. In most cases, this contract improves the profits of retailers but hurts the profits of manufacturers. Third, on the basis of the wholesale and retail price contract, the retailer pays a certain fixed compensation value (franchise fee) to the manufacturer. When the fixed compensation value is within a certain range, the wholesale and retail price contract with fixed compensation can achieve the coordination of the supply chain and simultaneously improve the profits of manufacturers and retailers. Fourth, when the proportion of consumers who prefer traditional channels is moderate, the wholesale and retail price contract with fixed compensation has good flexibility, and there is more room for bargaining between manufacturers and retailers regarding the fixed compensation value. When consumers have a clear channel preference, there is less room for bargaining between manufacturers and retailers regarding the fixed compensation value.
This article considers a manufacturer-dominant Stackelberg game, and future research could investigate Stackelberg games dominated by traditional retailers or Nash games where both parties make decisions simultaneously, which may yield different conclusions than those drawn in this article. Additionally, from an ease of implementation standpoint, this article designs wholesale and retail price contracts with fixed compensation to coordinate the platform dual-channel supply chain, and future research can explore the coordinating abilities of other contracts in this context. Finally, the establishment of the decision-making model in this article is based on the assumption of deterministic demand, and future research could expand from the perspective of random market demand.

Key words: platform, channel design, wholesale-retail price contract, fixed compensation