Abstract: Multichannel retailers sell products through online and offline channels, and provide return guarantee to reduce customers’ post-purchase regret. However,goods return by customers is a key factor that makes retailing complex and profit margin decline. In addition, strategic customer behavior (i.e., customers’ rational choice of purchase time in a longer period of time) also affects multichannel retailers. Therefore, the design of goods return policies in relation to strategic customer behavior has a profound impact on multichannel retailers. Aiming at these issues, we examine the base model (no return allowed), the original channel return policy and the crosschannel return policy (online purchase and offline return). Our results show that the quantity of products (including the quantity of online and offline channels) depends on the probability of product meeting the customers’ expectations and does not depend on the refund offered; in addition, if both the match probability of the online and offline channels are relatively low, the cross-channel return policy is conducive to improving the seller’s profit; if the match probability of both channels is high, cross-channel return policy and even original channel return policy may hurt the seller.

Key words: cross-channel, resale, refund, shopping cost