Abstract: Considering that the current operational performance of agro-food supply chains is poor, this paper proposes an agglomeration model based on O2O e-commerce. On the basis of a freshness decline function, a supply chain decision model considering fresh-keeping efforts and offline experience level is constructed for the agglomeration model and then is compared with the traditional e-commerce decision model based on time-varying customer utility function. The results show that the agglomeration model has a better performance than the traditional e-commerce model in terms of selling price, sales volume, fresh-keeping effort and overall profit. If the freshness declines rapidly and consumers are sensitive to the freshness or offline experience, the performance advantage of the agglomeration supply chain will increase. On the contrary, if consumers are sensitive to the price of fresh agricultural products, or the promoters ask for higher commissions, the performance advantage will decrease. Further, the numerical simulation results prove our theoretical results. In the end, some suggestions for platform enterprises, farms and other stakeholders are proposed to develop more efficient agro-food supply chains.

Key words: fresh agro-food, fresh-keeping efforts, supply chain performance, O2O, traditional e-commerce