关键词: 平台经济, 返利促销, 积分返利, 定价决策

Abstract: With the intensifying competition of online retail and the rapid development of e-commerce industry, rebate promotion has become an effective way for online retailers to attract consumers and enhance their competitiveness. Rebate promotion refers to the fact that when consumers purchase specified commodities from the merchant on the e-commerce platform or the rebate website, the merchant or the rebate website will give certain rebates to them according to the actual sales of the product in the form of cash, points, coupons, etc. Among them, cash rebates and point rebates are the most common two kinds of rebate promotion modes. Merchants can partner with third-party rebate platforms or websites to provide cash rebates to consumers by paying a certain commission. In addition, many large e-commerce platforms provide point rebates to consumers, and merchants can pay a certain percentage of sales share to participate in the point rebate on the e-commerce platform. Compared with other sales platforms or channels, large-scale e-commerce platforms have better reputation and quality assurance, so sellers selling products on large-scale e-commerce platforms have additional brand effect. However, compared with cash rebates, consumers have a certain degree of virtual awareness of point rebates. Meanwhile, compared with the traditional coupons, discounts and other immediate offers, cash rebate promotion has the characteristics of delayed cashing, that is, consumers need to complete the purchase, confirm the receipt of goods through application, certification or other ways to obtain rebates. As a result, consumers may eventually fail to redeem the rebate for various reasons such as forgetting, troublesome operation procedures, inconsistency between the effectiveness of the product purchased and the rebate redeemed, etc., which brings “arbitrage” opportunities for merchants and platforms. Therefore, how do different rebate models affect consumer utility and demand? How to determine the optimal rebate model selection strategy?
In order to explore the above problems, based on the consumer utility theory, we first consider the different effects of point rebates and cash rebates on consumers' utility, and construct the utility model of consumers under the two rebate modes. Then we set up a game system composed of the merchant, the e-commerce platform and the third-party rebate platform, and study the merchant's pricing decisions and the platform's rebate decisions when the merchant participates in point rebate and cash rebates respectively. Finally, we obtain the merchant's rebate promotion strategy and discuss the influence of relevant factors on the optimal decisions of the merchant and the platform. Our research finds that: (1)When the merchant chooses point rebates, its optimal pricing and profits increase with an increase in brand effect factor and consumers' virtual perception factor of point rebate, and brand effect factor has a greater impact. (2)When the sales sharing ratio of the e-commerce platform is small, an increase in consumers' virtual perception of points damages the profits of the e-commerce platform due to rebates. (3)When the merchant chooses cash rebates, its optimal pricing and optimal profit increase with an increase in the commission paid to the third-party rebate platform, and decrease with an increase in consumers' redemption rate for cash rebates. (4)When the commission of the third-party rebate platform is small, the profits of the third-party rebate platform will increase with an increase in the rebate redemption rate, whereas the profits of the third-party rebate platform will decrease with an increase in the rebate redemption rate. (5) The merchant will choose the point rebates only when the cash rebate rate of consumers is large and the sales sharing ratio with the e-commerce platform is small; otherwise, they will choose the cash rebates. Finally, the above conclusions are verified by numerical examples.
Although the above research has obtained some important and meaningful conclusions, there may be the following aspects to be further discussed and studied. First of all, we consider the rebate strategy of the merchant within a single cycle. However, in reality, the promotion rebate of enterprises to consumers is often a multi-cycle or even discontinuous commercial activity. Therefore, merchants' rebate promotion strategies under multiple cycles are worth exploring. In addition, we only consider the scenario of a single merchant, while in reality, there will be coexistence and competition among multiple merchants, multiple e-commerce platforms and multiple third-party rebate platforms. The competition and cooperation mechanism among decision-makers are also a possible research direction in the future.

Key words: platform economy, rebate promotion, point rebate, pricing decision