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

摘要： 先享后付是当下线上购物中应用十分普遍的一种购买方式。为此,本文基于双通道心理账户理论,考虑了先享后付购买方式对消费者购买心理的影响,考察了市场中机会主义消费者的存在对于零售商是否提供先享后付服务的影响。针对零售商提供的不同购买方式以及市场中的消费者类型,构建了正常购买方式和先享后付购买方式与普通消费者和机会主义消费者组合后的四种情形,得到了每种情形下零售商的最优销售策略,并对四种情形下的结果进行比较分析。结果表明:先享后付购买方式能够提高市场需求,且当消费者退货产生的麻烦成本较低时,零售商更倾向于提供这一服务。当零售商只提供正常购买方式时,机会主义消费者的存在会导致销售价格下降,零售商的利润减少。当市场中同时存在普通消费者和机会主义消费者,且贴现因子较小时,零售商提供先享后付服务能够收取较高的销售价格并且获得更多的利润。

关键词: 先享后付, 机会主义消费者, 双通道心理账户