›› 2016, Vol. 28 ›› Issue (11): 235-244.

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Group-buying or Advertising? Research on the Selection of Sales Strategy

Wu Cuilian1, Wang Qian1,2,3, Tian Xin1,2,3, Chen Qinghong4   

  1. 1. School of Economics and Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190;
    2. Research Center on Fictitious Economy and Data Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190;
    3. Key Laboratory of Big Data Mining and Knowledge Management, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190;
    4. Shanghai HEADING Information Engineering Co., Ltd., Shanghai 201112
  • Received:2015-03-11 Online:2016-11-28 Published:2016-11-23

Abstract:

As a new sales strategy, online group buying has got more and more attention. In this paper, pricing models of three sales strategies are built to study whether the online group guying can increase participating merchants' profits compared with the traditional ad-vertising promotion. Finally, a numerical variation is designed to analyze influences of the change of main parameters on commodity prices, demand, advertising investment level and revenue. The results show that advertising is always beneficial to merchants if there is no minimum level of advertising. When the size of high value market is large, the demand in high value market is not sensitive to price changes, the unit cost of goods is small, the advertising effect of the website is large or the profit sharing ratio is small, participating in the online group buying is more favorable to merchants. Otherwise, advertising is more favorable.

Key words: online group buying, advertising, pricing, sales strategy