Search

Live e-commerce is an emerging business model in one form of which online influencers sell goods through live-streaming platforms. In this paper, we develop a live e-commerce supply chain pricing model with online influencers as retailers, with which we investigate the effects of consumers’ impulsive consumption behavior, satisfaction. This paper analyzes the impact of consumers’ impulse purchases on both manufacturers and retailers, and separately, on supply chains. We also assess consumers’ purchase decisions when they watch online influencers promoting products via live-streaming. The results reveal that the impact of impulse spending on supply chain agents is non-monotonic. Rational pricing decisions and ensuring high-value products are the keys to profitability and impulse spending that lead to consumer satisfaction and can increase competition in the market. Therefore, supply chain decision makers should increase customers’ satisfaction by offering products and enhancement following impulse consumption, rather than simply encouraging further impulse consumption behavior, which can often result in buyer’s remorse and returned merchandize.

With the increasing popularity of online retail, many manufacturers have opened up their own online marketplaces, which has accelerated competition in the retail market. This paper considers a two-echelon supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer, where the retailer and the manufacturer sell the same product on their respective online platforms. This sales model creates channel conflicts in the supply chain. In order to explore the impact of this kind of conflict and sales efforts on the supply chain, we constructed consumers' utility functions when they buy products in different channels as well as a supply chain profit model where there is channel competition and sales efforts. The results show that the severity of channel conflicts affects consumers' choice of purchasing channels, and excessive channel conflicts will cause consumers to lose interest in shopping, channel conflicts will also make retailers and manufacturers more competitive. In addition, sales efforts can increase channel conflicts. Numerical analysis shows that although channel conflicts weaken the overall profit of the supply chain, it is more beneficial to manufacturers. Finally, we analyze the impact of channel conflicts and sales efforts on consumer surplus. We generate results to provide guidance for the operations of two-echelon supply chains.