Omnichannel Retail Operations with Buy-Online-and-Pick-up-in-Store

Many retailers have recently started to offer customers the option to buy online and pick up in store (BOPS). We study the impact of the BOPS initiative on store operations. We build a stylized model where a retailer operates both online and offline channels. Customers strategically make channel choices. The BOPS option affects customer choice in two ways: by providing real-time information about inventory availability and by reducing the hassle cost of shopping. We obtain three findings. First, not all products are well suited for in-store pickup; specifically, it may not be profitable to implement BOPS on products that sell well in stores. Second, BOPS enables retailers to reach new customers, but for existing customers, the shift from online fulfillment to store fulfillment may decrease profit margins when the latter is less cost effective. Finally, in a decentralized retail system where store and online channels are managed separately, BOPS revenue can be shared across channels to alleviate incentive conflicts; it is rarely efficient to allocate all the revenue to a single channel

Optimal Pricing Strategy for Multichannel Healthcare Services

As a combination of online and offline channel services, multichannel healthcare services currently play important roles in helping consumers solve their health problems. In this study, we establish a stylized model to investigate how healthcare service providers should price in multi-channels and when consumers should choose online service, taking misdiagnosis rate and the severity of disease problems into account. Our results show that the prices of the online channel and offline channel can increase when the misdiagnosis rate is low and minor problem inspection rate online is high. Moreover, when the diagnosis rate is high, the profit of online channel would increase, and then improve the profit of multichannel services. These findings provide insights for the theoretical research of online healthcare services and practice management on pricing strategies in multichannel healthcare services

To or Not to Cooperate with Third-Party E-commerce Platform: The Influence of Commission Fee and Service Level

The third-party e-commerce platform is now widely adopted by small and medium sized retailers. For the retailer, commission fee and service level provided by the platform are two key factors influencing the pricing strategy and sales profit. However, these two factors are rarely considered in previous operations models. Taking both factors into consideration, we formulate the decision-making problem of third-party e-commerce as a Stackelberg game where the platform is the leader and the retailer is the follower. Given the platform’ s commission fee, we derive optimal sales price for the retailer and optimal service level for the platform. Our result shows that the platform’s service level must be high enough to guarantee a positive profit and the effect of commission fee is dependent. Precisely, when the commission fee is small (or large) enough, the retailer and the platform can reach a consensus to increase (or to decrease) it. When it is moderate, they will bargain with each other, i.e., the retailer wants to decrease commission fee but the platform wants to increase it. Based on these observations, retailers are able to choose sales channel with more profit by comparing online store and offline shop

Shared Capacity Routing Problem – An Omni-channel Retail Study

More and more retailers allow customers to order goods online and then pick them up in a store. In this setting, these orders are typically served from a dedicated warehouse. This often means that the stores are visited by different vehicles to replenish the store inventory and to supply the pick-up points. Motivated by a collaboration with an omni- channel grocery retailer in the Netherlands, we study how to best share capacity between the routes associated with these different sales cha

Increasing customer satisfaction through Omnichannel retailing

Customer satisfaction is one of the success factors for many retailers. With the widespread use of smartphones worldwide, retailers have adopted many new innovative and disruptive retail business models. Digitalization brings retail business into a new era and has profoundly and positively affected the business' strategy. Retailers strive to provide customers with an easy, smooth, happy, joyful, and relaxed shopping experience. One of the disruptive digital innovations in retailing is Omnichannel Retailing. The ideas are to rejuvenate, revitalize, and increase customer satisfaction during their shopping journey either at the store (offline) or through online shopping platforms. The customer shopping experience is enhanced by providing channels and touchpoints that are emerged during their shopping journey. The objective of this study is to review the customer relationship literature within the context of the omnichannel retailing perspective. This study proposes a conceptual model to understand the factors that increase customer satisfaction through omnichannel retailing

Omnichannel Management in a B2B context: concept, research agenda and bibliometric review

The COVID-19 pandemic has driven increases in the provision of services through digitalchannels, even by more traditional companies. An Omnichannel model of service provisionposes new management challenges for companies. This research reviews the literature onOmnichannel Management by companies whose clients are other companies (B2B) andclassifies the different areas of research to date. The principal finding is that, despite considerable academic interest in Omnichannel management, there have been few studies of Omnichannel in the B2B field. This emphasizes a significant research gap to address. We have also outlined the Research Agenda to highlight future lines of research