关键词: 投机型消费者, 满减促销, 凑单式退货行为, 最优促销价格

Abstract: The advent of internet technology has greatly promoted the development of e-commerce retail. In order to achieve the goal of high transaction turnover, more and more platform retailers are implementing “Value Increasing” promotion strategy to stimulate consumers to engage in online shopping. “Value Increasing” promotion strategy, as an effective marketing tool, can help platform retailer gain a user base faster in the fiercely competitive market. Simultaneously, in order to enhance consumers’ purchasing confidence in the perceived uncertainty of product quality, platform retailer often provides money-back guarantee (MBG). Although “Value Increasing” promotion strategy and money-back guarantee (MBG) strategy have increased consumers’ perceived utility and purchasing confidence, thereby increasing sales, it is indeed the simultaneous implementation of these two strategies that have induced the speculative consumers’ add-on items return behavior. On the one hand, speculative consumers’ add-on items return behavior will affect the calculation of inventory resources of platform retailer. On the other hand, the behavior of “customers who choose the add-on item deliberately” to some extent also suppresses the normal online shopping of other consumers, leading to customer loss. However, existing researches on promotional returns mainly focuses on the impact of consumers’ strategic waiting behavior on retailer’s decision-making, with few considerations given to consumers’ speculative behavior. And this behavior is a new phenomenon caused by platform retailer jointly implementing “Value Increasing” promotion and providing money-back guarantee (MBG). Therefore, based on the gap of existing research, this paper not only considers the improvement of consumer purchasing confidence through the promotion and return joint strategy, but also the losses caused by the speculative consumers’ add-on items return behavior, to explore the product promotion pricing decisions of platform retailer. The research conclusions provide reference for platform retailer to formulate promotional prices and discount amounts in different situations, and a theoretical basis for platform retailer to (not) adopt MBG under specific conditions.
We attempt to analyze the “Value Increasing” promotion pricing decisions problem based on a scenario consisting of a platform retailer and two types of consumers (speculative consumer and ordinary consumers, respectively). Among them, speculative consumers will choose to purchase an additional add-on item to enjoy price discounts when their purchase amount is below the full reduction threshold. After successful payment, they will return the additional add-on item, while ordinary consumers will not do so. They make purchasing decisions based on the degree of relevance between two products. To solve the above problem, we construct single-cycle sales models considering the speculative consumers’ add-on items return behavior, and explore the optimal promotion pricing decisions under two situations where the platform retailer provides and does not provide money-back guarantee (MBG), respectively. Then, by comparing the two models, this paper explores the impact of the speculative consumers’ add-on items return behavior on the profits of platform retailer, as well as the threshold value for platform retailer to adopt (not) money-back guarantee (MBG).
Our results show that: (1)Under the two scenarios the optimal promotion price to maximize the profit of platform retailer is obtained, and the optimal promotion price under the scenario of providing money-back guarantee (MBG) is always higher than the promotion price under the scenario of no-return. (2)In the case of no-return, the optimal promotion price is only affected by the relevance between two products. In the case with money-back guarantee (MBG), the optimal promotion price varies with the probability of a product being added and the proportion of speculative consumers. (3)In addition, through the comparison of the profits under the cases of no-return and money-back guarantee (MBG), we find that the profits in the case with money-back guarantee (MBG) are not always higher than those in the case of no-return, and the boundary conditions for the platform retailer to adopt different modes are further given. (4)Finally, numerical analysis shows that in the case of providing money-back guarantee (MBG), a higher degree of the relevance between two products can suppress consumer speculative behavior to some extent. Moreover, in the case of a certain proportion of speculative behavior in market, when the amounts of discount allocated to product is relatively high and the probability of product regarded as add-on item is relatively low, no-return can bring greater benefits to the platform retailer. The research conclusions provide a better theoretical basis and reference for platform retailer to make optimal decisions.

Key words: speculative consumers, “Value Increasing” promotion, add-on items return behavior, optimal promotion price