"Buy Online, Pick Up in Store" under Fit Uncertainty: To Offer or Not to Offer. (4th July 2020)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- "Buy Online, Pick Up in Store" under Fit Uncertainty: To Offer or Not to Offer. (4th July 2020)
- Main Title:
- "Buy Online, Pick Up in Store" under Fit Uncertainty: To Offer or Not to Offer
- Authors:
- Li, Huijing
Yang, Shilei
Kang, Haiyan
Shi, Victor - Other Names:
- Xie Lei Guest Editor.
- Abstract:
- Abstract : Retailers offer BOPS (Buy Online, Pick Up in Store) service to improve consumers shopping experience. However, this greatly increases the decision complexity for retailers and consumers. For consumers, whether to purchase online or from a store with the BOPS service is a complex decision. This is especially true when the product has fit uncertainty. That is, consumers are uncertain about product fitness before using it. Also, their store visit cost can be heterogeneous and follows some distribution function. For a retailer, it needs to jointly optimize multiple decisions including the convenience degree of BOPS. To help the retailer develop the jointly optimal decisions, we first build a mathematical model where the retailer sells the product through online and store channel and analyzes the possible effects of BOPS. We find that the retailer should offer BOPS when the channel cost ratio (ratio of shipment fee divided by average store visit cost) is large enough. Through numerical studies, we show that the ratio of profit offering BOPS divided by the benchmark increases with the probability of product fit, shipment fee, and the convenience degree of BOPS. We then consider the case where the convenience degree of BOPS is also a decision itself. We find the optimal convenience degree of BOPS increases along with the average store visit cost and the probability of product fit. When the cost factor of offering the convenience for BOPS is larger than a threshold, theAbstract : Retailers offer BOPS (Buy Online, Pick Up in Store) service to improve consumers shopping experience. However, this greatly increases the decision complexity for retailers and consumers. For consumers, whether to purchase online or from a store with the BOPS service is a complex decision. This is especially true when the product has fit uncertainty. That is, consumers are uncertain about product fitness before using it. Also, their store visit cost can be heterogeneous and follows some distribution function. For a retailer, it needs to jointly optimize multiple decisions including the convenience degree of BOPS. To help the retailer develop the jointly optimal decisions, we first build a mathematical model where the retailer sells the product through online and store channel and analyzes the possible effects of BOPS. We find that the retailer should offer BOPS when the channel cost ratio (ratio of shipment fee divided by average store visit cost) is large enough. Through numerical studies, we show that the ratio of profit offering BOPS divided by the benchmark increases with the probability of product fit, shipment fee, and the convenience degree of BOPS. We then consider the case where the convenience degree of BOPS is also a decision itself. We find the optimal convenience degree of BOPS increases along with the average store visit cost and the probability of product fit. When the cost factor of offering the convenience for BOPS is larger than a threshold, the retailer should never offer BOPS. … (more)
- Is Part Of:
- Complexity. Volume 2020(2020)
- Journal:
- Complexity
- Issue:
- Volume 2020(2020)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 2020, Issue 2020 (2020)
- Year:
- 2020
- Volume:
- 2020
- Issue:
- 2020
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2020-2020-2020-0000
- Page Start:
- Page End:
- Publication Date:
- 2020-07-04
- Subjects:
- Chaotic behavior in systems -- Periodicals
Complexity (Philosophy) -- Periodicals
003 - Journal URLs:
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10990526 ↗
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ ↗
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/complexity/ ↗ - DOI:
- 10.1155/2020/3095672 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 1076-2787
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - 3364.585500
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 14299.xml