Pricing Decision of E-Commerce Supply Chains with Return and Online Review of Product Quality

Abstract

The online review function helps consumers grasp more real product information and reduce the possibility of returning, but it may also damage firms' reputations or profits. However, few studies considered the relationship between online reviews and consumer returns. Based on this, we develop an e-commerce supply chain (E-SC) game model consisting of a single manufacturer and a single e-platform, aiming to explore the relationship between consumer returns and online reviews and to analyze the impact on both the decision-making of E-SC members and their profits. We find that there is a negative relationship between consumer returns and online reviews of product quality, and consumer returns make the pricing decisions in the two scenarios of yes/no online reviews move toward two different directions. Only when the online review is positive and higher than a certain threshold will it have a positive impact on sales and E-SC members' profits. Finally, we design a new "commission joint returns and quality improvement costs sharing" contract to optimize the decentralized model with online reviews, and we find that the higher the accuracy of product information, the less conducive the contract applied to E-SC.