A Study of Two-level Inventory Allocation for E-commerce Pre-sales Based on Two Return Methods

Abstract

In recent years, e-commerce shopping festivals based on the presale model have become increasingly popular. Under the pre-sale model, some e-commerce companies have used inventory front-loading methods to give consumers higher time satisfaction for alleviating the pressure caused by order piling. At the same time a new return method has been generated, but existing studies have only considered the traditional return method. In this paper, a dualobjective decision model based on NSGA-II algorithm is developed for maximizing enterprise profit and maximizing consumer time satisfaction under the premise of considering both return methods, and the optimal two-level inventory allocation decision scheme is calculated for e-commerce enterprises. The results show that the existence of two return methods will have a more significant impact on enterprise profit, and therefore is more practical for e-commerce enterprises to make two-level inventory allocation decisions.

Keywords

• ecommerce pre-sale
• returns
• inventory front-loading
• inventory control
• twolevel inventory configuration