Toward Mass Customized Product Deployment in E-Commerce: The Modularization Function and Postponement Strategy

Strategically deploying customized products in an e-commerce environment not only helps businesses respond with greater agility to customer needs and strengthen their market position, but also helps businesses gain competitive edge and increase profitability. Underlying successful mass customization within the digital marketplace, a firm needs a methodology for striking a balance between the degree of customization and product pricing and delivery time—a critical supply chain issue. Providing either too much or too little customization can negatively impact both the business and the customer.

This study introduces a decision-making method for product customization. This method takes into account the level of customization, production costs, and the product delivery time and applies the concept of postponement strategy to the product supply chain to boost overall supply chain effectiveness and customer satisfaction. Bicycle customization is used as an example to demonstrate the feasibility of the new approach to determine the optimal level of customization in product deployment.     

The impact of information sharing and bullwhip effects on improving consumer services in dual-channel retailing

Data sharing among the supply chain players can be an exceptionally significant factor for the retailing industry. In this consideration, an improved retailing methodology for a dual-channel supply chain with a single retailer and manufacturer is built under the bullwhip effect and asymmetric data sharing. Retailer provides asymmetric information to the manufacturer regarding demand to increase their profit. In this scenario, measuring the bullwhip effect is essential in retailing strategy. By adopting an online-to-offline retailing strategy, industries can earn more profit and increase the satisfaction level of customers. The present study focuses on dual-channel retailing, where the demand for the product in both channels varies with the selling price. Keeping in mind the goal of sustainable development, an advanced transportation strategy is utilized in this study, along with some carbon emission costs. Autonomated inspection is utilized to identify defective products. Finally, centralized and decentralized profit functions are formulated for this study. Several cases and numerical examples are provided to validate this study. It is clear from the numerical findings that information sharing within the players provides 1.26% more profit compared to a decentralized case. Due to asymmetric information, which leads to the bullwhip effect, the retailing system faces loss. Thus, information sharing is 0.19% beneficial for dual-channel retailing. Sensitivity analysis for key parameters ensures the findings' applicability in the real world.     

The complex firm financial effects of customer satisfaction improvements

It has been widely assumed that increases in customer satisfaction have continuous financial benefits for firms. However, recent meta-analysis results and anecdotal evidence suggest substantial variability in satisfaction-performance effects. We propose and investigate three explanations for this variability: (1) changing trade-offs of financial benefits vis-à-vis costs along the satisfaction continuum, (2) varying stickiness of benefits and costs over time, and (3) contextual effects related to a firm’s marketing strategic situation. For our empirical investigation, we used customer satisfaction scores and financial data for around 100 U.S. firms over a 15-year period. The results show that revenues and savings in marketing and acquisition costs can accelerate at high satisfaction levels. However, for many firms, operating costs and capital investments also accelerate, and shareholder returns for satisfaction improvements can become negative. Tests over different assessment horizons show that operating cost increases are sticky while top line benefits fade. Finally, firm strategy, offering customization, potential of customer word of mouth, and competitive innovation pressure determine the satisfaction payoffs. Our study will help managers to predict more accurately than before the financial effects of their customer-directed investment decisions.     

Venture planning and analysis: An integrated approach to investment evaluation and product pricing

The venture planning and analysis (VPA) system is a quantitative analysis useful for developing pricing policy, projecting financial results, and comparing various investment opportunities. It is an integrated approach to product (investment) evaluation utilizing both marketing and cost information to determine an optimum pricing strategy.A venture plan is developed which covers several years of the anticipated life of the product (venture). The pricing strategy is determined by identifying the relationship between price, volume, and variable cost which yields the greatest positive cash flow. Revenue, variable expense, fixed expense, and engineering expense are input by fiscal year.The VPA system computes interest expense/income and cash flows. Ratios of the venture's quality-marginal investment quality factor and investment quality factor-are displayed, as are matrices which indicate the sensitivity of the venture to changes in the input data. Computer generated plots also help illustrate the cash flow and optimum level of production for each fiscal year of the analysis.     

Maximizing customer value via mass customized e-consumer services

While the Internet provides an ideal marketplace for customized services, its strategic potential has yet to be fully realized. In particular, multi-seller (or “cross retail”) partnerships are the key to a largely unexploited Internet strategy for mass customizing bundles of goods or services as value-added solutions to individual customer needs. This article uses mass customization successes to advance cross retailing as a comprehensive strategy that frames current Web initiatives specifically in terms of customer value. Exploiting the strategy will necessitate an understanding of the enablers and dimensions of mass customized “e-consumer services” (i.e., e-tail services, as well as service-related consumer products, that are defined and sold via the Internet). The overall success of the broader Internet marketplace will be determined not just by industry-wide cooperation, but also by the development of rich standards that allow for the highly customized bundling of products. More importantly, service providers will be differentiated by their ability to employ powerful Web interfaces within a strategy that comprehensively supports and extends a customer-controlled customization process.     

What drives consumers to customize products? The mediating role of brand experience

Brands are increasingly seeking ways to engage consumers in deep and meaningful brand experiences. As technological advances have developed, brands have an increasing arsenal to draw on in creating brand experience. One increasingly common tactic is product customization, whereby consumers are provided the ability to create their own products from a set of options. With this study, we seek to understand the mediating role of brand experience in consumer decisions to customize products. Specifically, we investigate the interplay of non-brand drivers (those intrinsic to the consumer) and brand drivers (those extrinsic to the consumer) in the context of customization. In doing so, we develop an understanding of consumers' intention to use a customization toolkit and their subsequent intention to purchase customized products. We find brand experience drives intention to use a customization toolkit, mediating the relationship between individual factors and usage intentions. A customer's prior experience and their intention to use a customization toolkit are also direct drivers of customized product purchase intention.     

Success Factors for Mass Customization: A Conceptual Model

Mass customization entails the ability to provide customized products and services to individual customers using technology (information) at optimal production efficiency and cost levels. The concept is gaining prominence because the marketing literature is increasingly focused on delivering superior customer value. Although the mass-customization literature provides many insights into its origins, formats and approaches, it does not provide a coherent framework to assess the viability of a successful mass-customization strategy. Based on the premise of customer perceived value, we have developed a conceptual framework to address this need. We present a series of hypotheses that serve to encourage other authors and direct future research.     

赌场豪华竞赛:产业两栖性制造的市场失败

赌场业是一种兼有服务业和金融业双重性质的产业.作为服务业,赌场的豪华程度以及与之相联系的服务产品质量的差异对于赌客是有意义的,在价格一律的条件下激励赌客由低档小赌场向高档大赌场流动.作为金融业,赌博价格是一个投资(赌博)回报率的概念,它无法作为反映赌场豪华程度和服务质量价差的价格杠杆作用.这导致了赌场业的有质差无价差的现象,进而赋予了豪华大赌场较之简陋小赌场的竞争优势,进而导致了在赌场建设上的豪华竞赛以及与此竞赛相联系的资源浪费和市场失败.文章研究和分析了由赌业的两栖性所导致和推动的赌场间豪华竞赛的经济动因和机理,进一步指出澳门赌业的发展,不能自由放任.     

再论“国际贸易的全成本”

从内涵看,"国际贸易的全成本"是某种物品的产权在跨国转移中,发生于国际贸易过程,进而涉及生产和消费、经济和生态、今人和后人,使用一切资源要素的代价总和;从外延看,"国际贸易的全成本"是以国际贸易中的生产成本、交易成本、环境成本和代际成本等为子系统的动态开放系统。其中,使用劳动、资本、土地等传统要素的机会成本为生产成本;使用制度要素的机会成本为交易成本;使用生态环境要素的机会成本为环境成本;耗费"可持续性"要素的机会成本为代际成本。贸易理论和现实的发展表明,国际贸易的动因是比较优势,比较优势的本质是比较成本优势,它反映了不同国家同种产品的机会成本差异。比较优势理论的"硬核"在于"比较之比较",其"外围保护带"则表现为对资源要素和成本外延的界定。为化解比较优势理论面临的种种冲突和困境,有必要拓展它的成本观,使其成为进步而非退化的研究纲领。因此,使用或耗费广义要素而形成的"全成本"是一国参与国际分工和贸易的比较优势的基础。     

海南兰花网络营销的机遇与挑战

海南兰花营销：发展机遇与挑战同在,价值存在提升空间。但一直以来海南兰花产业发展缓慢,目前流通模式仍是“公司＋基地＋农户”,导致物流成本居高不下。网络营销有利于兰花形成产、供、销一体化,降低成本。随着海南兰花网络营销条件日趋成熟,电子商务平台的构建,为供应链中生产、采购、销售等各个环节提供了实时信息和技术服务。能促使兰花生产从粗放型向集约型转变,有效地实现市场信息、技术信息和产品信息的共享,能大大提高兰花的附加值与竞争力,增加销售额。海南应加大政府资金投入,提高从业人员的素质,加强与教育部门等单位合作;健全兰花产品质量标准体系;大力研发新品种。调整兰花品种,完善物流体系,早日成为国内最大的兰花交易网络平台。     

Environmental reporting: Toward enhanced information quality

Managers and stakeholders are increasingly aware of the importance of the environmental impact of a firm's operations when assessing risk and attempting to determine future profitability. Unfortunately, financial accounting systems often fail to fully disclose these environmentally-related costs. The reasons underlying this incomplete disclosure are myriad, ranging from measurement issues to the structure of the firm's chart of accounts. In many ways, the issues facing managers and stakeholders who are attempting to assess environmental costs arising from business operations resemble the issues faced when attempting to determine the costs of producing poor quality products. The negative impact on the environment from business operations can be viewed as a failure in the same way that the negative impact of producing a defective product can be seen as a production control failure. Similarly, costs are incurred to prevent and detect environmental failures, and the cost of failure—particularly if not addressed within the firm—can be huge and unknowable. Drawing on the experiences of firms employing quality measures and reporting, this article presents an environmental cost reporting model to provide greater transparency on environmental impact of business operations to managers and firm stakeholders.     

Consumer response to and choice of customized versus standardized systems

Recent research on customization suggests that a need exists to examine conditions under which selling customized versus non-customized offerings will be more beneficial to vendors. To this end, this paper empirically evaluates consumer response to and choice of customized systems (offerings that are integrated and customized) in relation to standardized systems (offerings that feature integration but not customization). Through a series of studies, we demonstrate that the relationship between a buyer's systems purchase strategy and their future repurchase intentions toward the seller is moderated by a buyer characteristic (that is, a consumer's insight into his/her own preferences, or the degree to which a consumer can confidently and consistently express his or her true preferences) as well as a seller characteristic (retailer reputation). Given that consumers who are experts have greater insight into their own preferences than novices, our work also suggests that this greater insight into one's own preferences is a plausible explanation for why experts are more likely to choose a customized system. The main practical implication of our research is that it prompts managers to challenge the contention in some mass customization writings that customized offerings have universal appeal. Although the participants in our studies also tended to be more attracted to customized systems in general, this proclivity was lower for consumers with less product category expertise. This is important because our results convey that repurchase intentions towards a vendor will be higher after the purchase of a non-customized system by those consumers who lack insight into their preferences. As such, firms should try to propose customized systems only to those prospective buyers who possess strong preference insight, and propose standardized systems to those buyers who do not.     

Banks,grocers and the changing retailing of financial services in Britain

The entry of the three largest grocery retailers into retail financial services marks an escalation of competition in financial services retailing in Britain. This paper explores the increasingly porous boundaries between banking and retailing, focusing on changes in the economics of information gathering, shifts in the production, marketing and consumption of retail financial services, and a series of changes in the competitive and regulatory environment of grocery retailing. The paper argues that grocery retailers’ moves into financial services raise important issues concerning both the management of strategic alliances and their impact on social inclusion and exclusion. The paper elaborates on this argument by examining four potentially problematic issues arising from the alliances between banks and retailers: the shifting geographies of financial services provision, the development and maintenance of brand leadership, the production and use of management knowledge and consumers’ access to financial services.     

Channel Selection and Coordination in Dual-Channel Supply Chains

This paper investigates the influence of channel structures and channel coordination on the supplier, the retailer, and the entire supply chain in the context of two single-channel and two dual-channel supply chains. We extensively study two Pareto zone concepts: channel-adding Pareto zone and contract-implementing Pareto zone. In the channel-adding Pareto zone, both the supplier and the retailer benefit from adding a new channel to the traditional single-channel supply chain. In the contract-implementing Pareto zone, it is mutually beneficial for the supplier and the retailer to utilize the proposed contract coordination policy. The analysis suggests the preference lists of the supplier and the retailer over channel structures with and without coordination are different, and depend on parameters like channel base demand, channel operational costs, and channel substitutability.     

也谈供应商管理

在今日企业的经营生产活动中,强调供应链一体化,外购、外协部品在生产工具成本中所占的比例往往占到总成本的一半抑或更高。供应商不单影响生产成本,更决定了企业生产产品的质量与过程的产出率。因此,保证企业在尽可能大的范围内选择并获取优质服务,也保证投标者有一个公平竞争的机会是每个企业必须面对的难题。     

Is the system reliability profitable for retailing and consumer service of a dynamical system under cross-price elasticity of demand?

Retailing strategy is one of the most crucial factors for industries. A proper retailing strategy can help to enhance consumer service and increase the industry's profit. An improved approach to retailing is suggested in this research to deliver superior customer service while maximizing profits in a dynamic system. The study analyzes a retailing strategy for a demand with cross-price elasticity upon the retail price. A product's cross-price elasticity and the system reliability are critical factors in retailing. Understanding the cross-price elasticity of demand between products helps retailers to make pricing decisions that maximize profits by maintaining demand. Imperfect products are produced due to an imperfect production system. The imperfect ones must be adjusted with some costs to make them perfect for better retailing. The system failure rate is crucial for retailing under cross-price elasticity of demand patterns. Production system reliability, cross-price elasticity of demand, and consumer service are all essential factors that can impact a company's success in the market. The production rate is considered time- and system failure rate-dependent. Contradictory to the literature, a dynamical system is proposed for improved retail management, which is solved using the Euler-Lagrange theory. Finally, one can achieve the expected maximum profit for this retail system with optimum selling prices for different products by reducing the system failure rate. Some numerical illustrations with graphical representations are provided to validate the current study. Numerical examples show that applying cross-price elasticity of demand for more than two identical products provides 35% more profit for the retail industry than a single type of product.     

Sustainabilty and retail marketing: Corporate,product and store perspectives

This paper investigates sustainability in retailing based on three different perspectives: i) the overall corporate management, ii) the development of an attractive product range, iii) the daily in-store management and activities. The purpose is to identify a set of main themes for each perspective, investigate contradictions and areas of conflict, and discuss how to bridge the perspectives. A qualitative case study approach is applied investigating the global retailer IKEA. The study includes Sweden, Germany and the UK. The research showed that the corporate, product and store perspectives are complementary but also involve contradictions and barriers to giving a higher priority to sustainability. These concern the time perspective, the set of stakeholders considered and the overall priority. Developing goals and benefits linked to sustainability, using effective arenas for interactions and linking sustainability to the legend and culture are suggested as three bridges that may overcome the contradictions.     

Perceived assortment and consideration of customized products

Customization in the marketplace has become much more commonplace as information technology and flexible manufacturing systems continue to evolve. Consumer research into customization decisions has subsequently examined the implications of customization as compared to traditional assortment product offerings, finding that customization yields both positive implications for consumer preference matching as well as higher evaluations of retailers, chosen products, and even the process itself. The present research examines the implications that customization of products has on consumers’ decision processes, and on their perceptions of assortment and how they consider products. Two experimental studies suggest that customization decisions may negatively affect consumers’ perceptions of assortment, while also reducing the number of alternatives they consider, and that this in turn may have implications for their evaluation of, and willingness-to-pay for, customized products.     

Customizing calories: How rejecting (vs. selecting) ingredients leads to lower calorie estimation and unhealthier food choices

Customization of food products has increased substantially in recent years while the desire for healthiness and an emphasis on understanding and providing calorie information continues to dynamically change the landscape of restaurant retail. The authors report four studies demonstrating that different customization routes (i.e., rejecting alternatives from a full product offering versus adding alternatives to a basic product offering) lead to systematic, but predictable, differences in consumers’ estimations of calories. In particular, this research finds that a rejection (vs. selection) customization process leads consumers to persistently estimate lower calories in the final product, which then improves evaluations of the retailer and leads to unhealthier food choices. These findings occur when consumers estimate calories of the exact same final product using the different paths to customization as well as when they create their own customized final product, while accounting for differences in the quantity and type of ingredients selected, suggesting a very general difference in estimations. This research has important implications for consumers who want to manage their weight and for firms that need to manage consumers’ health perceptions.     

Do you think that the home delivery is good for retailing?

Order placing and delivery always play a significant role in any business industry. Nowadays, most customers want useful products at their doorstep without visiting any retail store. In this current study, an advanced dual-channel supply chain model is constructed for a single product with two players. Customers can order online or offline from the retail store. In contrast, retailers use only offline mode to take the product from the manufacturer, and retailers charge a different amount for delivery. To optimize profit and satisfy the consumers, retailers only provide a free transportation service when customers order a certain quantity. If customers order less than the desired amount, a transportation charge will be applied to the customers. Contrary to the existing research, demand for the products varies with the selling price online and offline and is also affected by the free home delivery service. Manufacturers use a single-setup multi-delivery (SSMD) transportation strategy to enrich the system's profit. To make the study more applicable, all unit costs are considered fuzzy. Signed-distance defuzzification technique is adopted to defuzzify the fuzzy values. Finally, the total profit of the supply chain is optimized along with the optimized value of the decision-making variable through an uncertain optimization technique. Numerical experiments are carried out along with sensitivity analysis to show the applicability and optimality of this study. Though the crisp data set provided a 0.72% better result compared to the fuzzy data set, but fuzzy data set provided a more realistic result. Numerical results prove that the home delivery service provided 14.59% better profit. Finally, it can be stated that the home delivery policy with some charged amount based on ordered quantity is the best retailing strategy for the dual-channel supply chain.