A comparative research on online advance selling strategies of suppliers and e-commerce platforms

With the booming development of e-commerce, suppliers’ voice in the supply chain is gradually increasing. The expansion of the agency sales model, which takes suppliers as the main sales entity, on e-commerce plat-forms has led to interest games and channel conflicts between suppliers and e-commerce platforms. Suppliers need to focus on how to increase their profits while mitigating channel conflicts when expanding online sales channels. Therefore, this paper explores whether and how suppliers and e-commerce platforms choose pre-sales, focusing on two different e-commerce supply chain sales models: the agency model and the wholesale model. It introduces three pre-sales marketing strategies that are most commonly adopted on e-commerce platforms today. The paper compares three online marketing strategies adopted by different decision-making entities under the two sales modes and discusses the preferences of suppliers and e-commerce platforms for the two sales modes.