Pricing Strategies in Dual-online Channels Based on Consumers' Shopping Choice

Besides an official website mall (OWM), retail stores on the third party e-commerce platform(3PEP) is an another important online channel that manufacturers adopt to sell online. How to properly price products in these two channels simultaneously is a tough problem to firms and gains much attention by researchers. In this paper, we analyze their channel choice, and give demand functions of the two channels based on the consumers’ segmentation and preference. Then we design a sale model including two online channels: OWM and a retail store on 3PEP. According the Stackelberg game theory, we calculate and discuss the optimal pricing strategies of the manufacturer and retailer in three feasible regions. The result shows that manufacturers emphasizing channel sales prefer to choose pricing strategies that helps two online channels share the online market. But some manufacturers think adjusting the OWM’s price and the wholesale price to control the retailer’s pricing strategies is reasonable and necessary, even if nobody will prefer the OWM. © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of KES International.