Abstract: When confronting with a fund shortage problem, the online retailers often use the supply chain financing. As an innovative mode of supply chain financing, the third part logistics (3PL) firm financing service has been practiced in the recent years. Besides, the newsvendor-like the online retailer is capital-constrained and can choose between 3PL firm financing and bank credit financing. Therefore, it is worth to study an equilibrium and coordinating strategy of the supply chain with a limited working capital online retailer under the bank or 3PL firm financing service.
In this paper, it is assumed that the supply chain comprises a capital-constrained online retailer and a 3PL firm, where the online retailer functions as the follower who decides the order quantity and the lender (bank or 3PL firm) functions as the leader who declares the loan interest rate or the 3PL firm's transportation fee. Two financing options (3PL firm financing and bank credit financing) are presented for an online retailer in order to study the interaction of the financing and operating decisions. Our model offers some analyses of the equilibrium and coordination of 3PL firm financing from a supply chain perspective. In the decentralized 3PL firm financing system, the Stackelberg equilibrium and local optimal parameters are obtained.
From the equilibrium and coordinating analyses, it is concluded that the active 3PL firm financing can achieve supply chain financing coordination, yielding a larger order quantity and larger participants' profits than those yielded through BCF, while the conservative may not. When the coordination condition on order quantity is satisfied, if the initial working capital is a constant, there exists a linear decreasing trend between the 3PL firm's loan interest rate and the transportation fee. When the weak coordination conditions are satisfied, the active 3PL firm can offer many coordinated financing contracts, which are applicable to different initial working capital conditions. For achieving supply chain financing coordination, the 3PL firm should be active to adjust his loan interest rate and transportation fee together. Moreover, even if the online retailer has sufficient working capital, he always prefers using the coordinated active 3PL firm financing to refusing any outside financing.

Key words: online retailer, the third logistics(3PL), stackelberg game, capital-constrained, supply chain coordination