关键词: 需求信息共享, 双渠道, 直销渠道, 电商平台

Abstract: With the rapid development of e-commerce, a great number of manufacturers are establishing online direct sales channels to better meet the online shopping demand. While distributing products through e-commerce platforms, many manufacturers choose to either establish flagship stores on these platforms (e.g., Midea and Bear Electric Appliance) or sell directly to consumers through their own official malls (e.g., Lenovo and Apple). Compared with manufacturers, e-commerce platforms can collect rich consumer data to effectively predict market demand, thus having an advantage in demand information. Based on this background, our study attempts to answer these questions: Under what conditions should the platform provide demand information to the manufacturer? How does the demand information sharing decision of the platform affect the manufacturer’s direct selling strategy? How does the direct sales strategy of the manufacturer affect the platform’s profit and the overall supply chain profit? These findings will provide guidelines for e-commerce platforms in deciding whether to share demand information and for manufacturers in designing their direct sales strategies.
This paper considers a Stackelberg game model consisting of a manufacturer and an e-commerce platform. The manufacturer leads the game, and the platform follows. When reselling products through the platform, manufacturers either rely on the e-commerce platform to establish flagship stores (“resale+agency” model), or build their own official mall to sell products directly to consumers (“resale+self-build” model). Depending on whether the platform chooses to share or withhold its forecasted demand information from the upstream manufacturer, with both parties aiming to maximize their respective expected profits, we formulate objective functions for four scenarios: cases with and without information sharing under both the “resale+agency” and “resale+self-build” models. Subsequently, we derive the optimal decisions through backward induction. First, we analyze the e-commerce platform’s decision making regarding demand information sharing, and then discuss how the manufacturer chooses the direct selling model according to the platform’s information sharing decision. Our findings indicate that: (1)Under the “resale+self-build” model, the e-commerce platform does not share its demand information with the manufacturer, whereas under the “resale+agency” model, the commission rate plays a pivotal role in the platform’s information sharing strategy: a high commission rate incentivizes the platform to share demand information with the manufacturer, while a low rate leads to no information sharing. (2)For the manufacturer, the decision to build an official mall tends to occur under two conditions: (i) if the e-commerce platform does not share demand information in either model and the self-build channel’s unit selling cost is low; or (ii) if the platform does share demand information in the “resale+agency” model and the accuracy of this information is low. (3)For the e-commerce platform, if it chooses to withhold demand information under both the “resale+self-build” and the “resale+agency” models while the self-build channel’s per-unit selling cost remains low, or alternatively decides to share demand information with high accuracy under the “resale+agency” model, the manufacturer’s establishment of a flagship store ultimately proves strategically advantageous for the platform. (4)For the supply chain, if the e-commerce platform either withholds demand information in both models, or chooses to share such information in the “resale+agency” model and the demand information accuracy is high, the manufacturer’s establishment of a flagship store delivers significant benefits to the supply chain.
Our study focuses on the game between a manufacturer and an e-commerce platform. In the future, we could extend to scenarios with multiple manufacturers or e-commerce platforms, e.g., examining competition among supply chain members to further explore the demand information sharing decisions of e-commerce platforms and the upstream manufacturers’ direct channel strategies. In addition, based on the findings of this study, it is always beneficial for the manufacturer when the e-commerce platform shares demand information with it, while the platform may choose not to share such information. Future research can discuss what incentive mechanisms manufacturers can develop to ensure e-commerce platforms consistently share real-time demand information.

Key words: demand information sharing, dual-channel, direct sales channel, e-commerce platform