关键词: 先享后付, 机会主义消费者, 双通道心理账户

Abstract: With the rapid development of science and technology and the continuous progress of e-commerce, the retail industry has ushered in new development opportunities. In order to meet the development needs of thedigital economy era, more and more enterprises begin to transform. They open online sales channels on the basis of traditional sales channels and implement diversified sales methods. While online operations bring dividends to the development of enterprises, they also bring new challenges. For example, consumers have higher requirements for the delivery speed of goods, the service level of merchants, and after-sales service, etc., which affect consumers’ purchasing behavior.More importantly, because consumers cannot perceive and experience the product, they cannot accurately evaluate the value of the product to themselves, and may choose to return the product after receiving it. Returning product brings hassle cost to consumers, such as time cost and transportation cost, which further deepens consumers’ pre-purchase concerns. In order to alleviate consumers’ concerns about online purchases and improve their shopping experience, major e-commerce platforms have successively launched a new purchase method, which is try-before-you-buy. Under the try-before-you-buy purchase mode, consumers can experience the product for free and pay after the trial period, which greatly improves customer satisfaction. However, some consumers abuse the lenient return policies provided by retailers. They buy products with the intention of short-term borrowing rather than long-term consumption, which is called opportunistic consumers in this paper. They bring losses to the retailers, which is inevitable. So they have attracted the attention of the retailers, and are also the research hotspot of scholars in the field of consumer returns. Therefore, the opportunistic behavior of consumers has become the key issue that retailers need to pay attention to when deciding whether to provide the try-before-you-buy purchase mode.
   Against the background of a single retailer selling products through online channels, this paper takes the psychological account and opportunistic behavior of consumers as the perspective. Based on the double-entry mental accounting theory and expected utility theory of consumers, we consider the impact of the try-before-you-buy purchase mode on consumers’ purchase psychology, and investigate the impact of opportunistic consumers in the market on whether the retailer should provide the try-before-you-buy purchase mode. According to different purchase modes that can be provided by the retailer and different types of consumers in the market, this paper examines four cases in which the normal purchase mode and try-before-you-buy purchase mode are combined with regular consumers and opportunistic consumers, obtains the optimal selling strategy of the retailer in each case, and the results of the four cases are compared and analyzed with numerical analysis.
   The research results show that the try-before-you-buy purchase mode can improve the market demand, and the retailer is more inclined to provide this service when the return hassle cost of the consumers is low. When the retailer only provides the normal purchase mode, opportunistic consumers will decrease the selling price and the profit of the retailer. When there are both regular consumers and opportunistic consumers and the discount factor is small, the retailer can charge a higher selling price and obtain a higher profit by providing try-before-you-buy service.The results of this paper not only enrich the related research on the try-before-you-buy purchase mode and opportunistic consumers, but also have certain guiding significance for retailers to decide sales strategies.

Key words: try-before-you-buy, opportunistic consumers, double-entry mental account