Pricing Strategy in a Dual-channel Supply Chain with Return Policy

Abstract

This study considers a dual-channel supply chain which consists of one manufacturer and one retailer. The manufacturer sells product to customer through traditional channel and Internet channel respectively. According to the preference of customer, we group the product market into three parts, which is more close to the reality. The manufacturer forecasts the demand for three groups, but the actual demand is less than his expectation. We introduce a full-refund return policy and service value into model to investigate the performance of supply chain. In order to maximize their profits, manufacturer and retailer should make decisions on the pricing strategies. Through numerical simulations, we find that the return policy can effectively reduce the risk which is caused by the demand uncertainty. And the service value has two sides, which should be paying more attention on. We also derive several conclusions on the optimal sale strategy for the manufacturer and retailer in this study. © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2013.