关键词: 折价预售, 定金膨胀, “线下体验+预售”, 风险厌恶, 策略型消费者

Abstract: With the development of e-commerce, pre-sale, as an effective sales strategy, has been widely used in retail industries such as new products and short-life cycle products. However, pre-sales are a double-edged sword for consumers. Although pre-sales can provide consumers with the opportunity to pre-order products, and pre-sales are usually accompanied by some preferential activities, during the pre-sale period, consumers have not yet seen the physical product or experienced the real product. Consumers are faced with the risk of uncertainty in the valuation of pre-ordered products, which will further affect consumer pre-order behavior and retailers' revenue. In order to reduce the impact of uncertainty in the valuation of pre-sale products and improve consumer satisfaction, many retailers provide full refund services for pre-sale products or provide consumers with some new pre-sale models, such as deposit inflation and the offline experience+pre-sale mode. These new pre-sale models are designed to solve consumers' valuation uncertainty, so that consumers can wait until the valuation is confirmed before completing the pre-order order, reducing consumers' pre-order risk. Therefore, how to choose an appropriate pre-sale model and determine the optimal pre-sale price and order quantity is an important issue that retailers face when formulating pre-sale strategies.
This paper considers the current mode of deposit inflation and offline experience+pre-sale adopted by retailers in online pre-sales, and the situation where retailers provide returns for pre-ordered products at the risk of uncertain valuation of consumers' pre-orders. Aiming at the retailer's pre-sale period and current sale period, this paper discusses the choice of three pre-sale models for retailers when consumer valuation is uncertain. The first is a discounted pre-sale that provides a full refund service; the other two models are for consumers to complete the pre-order after the valuation is confirmed: deposit inflation and the “offline experience+pre-sale” model. And we analyze the retailer's optimal pre-sale price and order quantity decision-making problem. The consumer's purchase process is described by constructing the consumer utility function, and the retailer's profit model is constructed for three situations, and the optimal order quantity and pre-sale price of the retailer under the three pre-sale modes are solved by using the newsboy model and K-T conditions. And we analyze the impact of consumer risk aversion, retailer's net loss due to product returns and consumer experience product trouble cost on retailer's pre-sale decision and pre-sale model selection, so as to provide guidance for retailers to formulate product pre-sale strategies.
　The research shows that consumers and retailers have high costs due to returns, compared with deposit inflation and the offline experience+pre-sale sales model. When a retailer implements a discounted pre-sale model that allows returns, it should set a relatively high pre-sale price to make up for the losses caused by consumers' returns. The choice of the retailer's pre-sale mode is related to the construction cost of the experience store and the product out-of-stock rate during the regular sale period. There is a threshold for the construction cost of an experience store. If the retailer adopts the offline experience+pre-sale model and the construction cost of the experience store is high, the retailer should abandon the offline experience+pre-sale sales model and choose a discounted pre-sale model that allows full refunds or a deposit-inflated pre-sale model. When consumers' risk aversion is low and they don't care too much about the uncertainty of product valuation, they can pre-order online without having to experience the product. Therefore, at this time, under the offline experience+pre-sale model, retailers should lower the pre-sale price to attract consumers to pre-order. When consumers have high risk aversion, they will prefer to experience the product before purchasing the product. At this time, retailers can take the opportunity to improve the pre-sale price of the offline experience+pre-sale model to increase the gross profit margin.

Key words: discount pre-sale, deposit inflation, offline experience+pre-sale, risk aversion, strategic consumer