| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 行銷學系所 === 104 === Gomaji has entered the group-buying market since 2010. In Taiwan , Gomaji have more than 50 percent market share. In the second half of 2015, limited discounts and other market restrictions have slow down its growing rate. For this reason, Gomaji has decided to transform itself from a discount-oriented group-buying gadget to a coupons platform providing all the activities. Hence more and more product merchants are planning to use this new-style channel to reach their targeted consumers. However, the preferential schemes for merchants to use this channel and increase their benefits are rare in studies to date. Hence a discussion on the issue is presented in this research.
An interesting phenomenon can be observed in this marketing channel. When the inventory level posted on the website is decreasing, it possibly implies that more and more people are consuming this product/service. Due to the word-of-mouth effect, shoppers’ willing to buy can be expanded. For this reason, we assume the group-buying rate is positively correlated with the inventory level in this research. Another factor to the group-buying rate is the pricing strategy. Intuitively, higher prices will increase the retailer’s unit profit, but reduce the group-buying rate. Furthermore, on-line sales horizon also needs to be considered for which can affect both the retailer’s expenditure and the product sales volume. In short, this study uses inter-relationship between price, inventory, sales horizon, and inventory-dependent group-buying rate to derive a decision-support model.
Formulating an online group-buying decision model as a supporting scheme for merchants to determine time horizon, inventory quantity and price, and maximize their total sales profit is the purpose of this research. We use storage capacity, time horizon and price as the decision variables and achieve their optimal closed-form solution. Besides, we use numerical analysis and sensitivity analysis to identify the influence of each parameter in this decision model. The result shows market size is the most significant effect in our model. It is intuitive that online group-buying merchants should increase their initial inventory levels as market size increases.
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