关键词: 预售, 退货期限, 退货策略, 报童模型, 广告

Abstract: With the rapid development of e-commerce and the Internet, the pre-sale model has promoted the transformation, upgrading, and huge changes of the retail industry in the era of “new retail”. The complex and changing market environment has made the selection of enterprise marketing strategies and pricing decisions increasingly complex. Consumers are gradually becoming rational when facing the “fancy marketing”, frequent promotions, and price reductions of companies, and they are exhibiting strong strategic behavior. On the one hand, in order to reduce the risk of uncertain pre-purchase valuation for consumers and attract them to purchase in advance, retailers usually provide return services when selling pre-sale products, and there are differences in the way different retailers handle returned products. Some merchants do not resell returned products, such as Qiandama and Baiguoyuan, which consider all returned fruits as store losses; While some merchants repackage returned products for resale, such as Guomei Online and Kuba.com, which provide a seven-day unconditional return service and reprocess products that are unused and do not affect resale for a second sale. Although retailers providing pre-sale return services can improve the utility of consumer pre-purchases, they also face a large amount of return risk. Therefore, in order to obtain more revenue, the decision of whether retailers should adopt pre-sale strategies and provide return services, return policy selection, and optimal pre-sale prices, return prices, return deadlines, and order quantities are important issues that retailers face when formulating marketing strategies. On the other hand, retailers can further expand the potential market size of products during the pre-sale stage through advertising investment, and pre-sales have an indispensable role in the product’s promotion.
This article focuses on the situation where retailers have limited return periods, taking into account factors such as consumer valuation uncertainty, demand uncertainty, consumer strategic behavior, demand information updates, and advertising investment, and attempts to address the following questions: What are the prerequisites for retailers to adopt a pre-sale strategy? What are the prerequisites for advertising and promoting pre-sale information? Under what circumstances do retailers provide limited return period return services? When retailers adopt pre-sale or pre-sale return strategies, what are the optimal pre-sale prices, return prices, return deadlines, order quantities, and advertising investment optimization decisions? Additionally, how do consumer product experiences, retailer return ratios, advertising investment, and return deadlines affect the choice of pre-sale return strategies? Therefore, this study considers that enterprises can expand the potential market size of the presale phase through advertising investment and constructs a presale-return policy model for retailers under the influence of advertising investment and return deadlines: Four presale strategies including no presale, no return, return but not resell, and return and resell, are analyzed. The study solves the retailer’s optimal presale price, return price, order quantity, return deadline, and advertising investment, and further compares and analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the four presale strategies and their critical conditions. The profitability of advertising in product presale information and the retailer’s advertising decision-making are also analyzed.
The research finds that presale strategies can reduce the inventory risk of retailers. Retailers offering return services with a return deadline are always better than selling strategies without return services, and the retailer’s optimal return deadline needs to be determined based on the customer’s return ratio and the product’s life cycle. Whether retailers resell returned products mainly depends on the impact of presale prices, product return deadlines, and return prices. If the presale price under the situation of reselling returns is lower than that under the situation of not reselling returns, the retailer should adopt the presale strategy of reselling returns; Otherwise, it should not. If the presale price is higher than the threshold , then the retailer should adopt the presale strategy. At this point, if the total market size is large, the retailer should invest in advertising to promote presale. If the presale price is lower than the threshold , then the retailer should not invest in advertising, and the presale should only be carried out when the total market size is small. Otherwise, the retailer will only sell during the spot period. Future research will aim to investigate the multi-period collaborative issues involved in the retail sales operations. Specifically, the advertising strategies implemented by retailers in the previous period for certain products may still exert a significant influence on the subsequent sales of those products. As such, it is necessary to delve more deeply into the presale and return strategies of retailers’ multi-period sales processes.

Key words: advance selling, return deadline, return strategy, newsvendor, advertising