Liu, H.; Du, F. Research on E-Commerce Platforms’ Return Policies Considering Consumers Abusing Return Policies. Sustainability2023, 15, 13938.
Liu, H.; Du, F. Research on E-Commerce Platforms’ Return Policies Considering Consumers Abusing Return Policies. Sustainability 2023, 15, 13938.
Liu, H.; Du, F. Research on E-Commerce Platforms’ Return Policies Considering Consumers Abusing Return Policies. Sustainability2023, 15, 13938.
Liu, H.; Du, F. Research on E-Commerce Platforms’ Return Policies Considering Consumers Abusing Return Policies. Sustainability 2023, 15, 13938.
Abstract
Currently, major e-commerce platforms are competing to improve their return services, while merchants are experiencing abuse of return policies by consumers. The effectiveness of lenient return policies is examined in helping e-commerce platforms gain a competitive advantage in this paper. A dual oligopoly model is established consisting of one platform that offers a lenient return policy with services like Instant Refunds and the other does not provide similar ones. The scenario where consumers are single-homing, while merchants are partial multi-homing is analyzed. In the scenario, many factors are examined to assess their impact on the scale of the bilateral user base and the profits for both platforms, including the proportion of consumer abusing return policies, the benefits derived from abusive returns, penalties. and costs. The findings indicate that: (1) With an increasing proportion of consumer abusing return policies, the multi-homing merchants on platform that offer lenient return service will choose to be exclusively affiliated with rival platform, accounting for a decrease in consumer base and lower platform profits compared to competitors. (2) Platform that provides lenient return policies should restrict the amount of returns to mitigate the impact of consumer abusing return policies on its profits. (3) When the proportion of consumers abusing return policies is relatively low, platform should choose moderate levels of penalty to increase the scale of both sides of users without excessively increasing costs. However. when this proportion is high, platforms should cease to offer lenient return and refund services.
Business, Economics and Management, Business and Management
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
