Abstract:

The uncertainty of the products’ real quality in online shopping makes the issue of product return in online shopping increasingly complex， and more and more products are sold in multiple stages. Considering the influence of early comments on the subsequent stage of product sales and returns， it is necessary to study the joint decision of online sellers' pricing and ordering in the case of flawless returns. Online sellers sell their products in the daily sales stage and promotion stage， online sellers plan to adopt comment improvement strategies to beautify the product comments so as to improve the consumer's initial value perception in the next stage. Consumers decide whether to buy a product according to the initial value perception， and make favorable comments， negative comments， or return processing according to the perceived differences.Based on the initial value perception of consumers before purchasing products and the perception differences after purchasing， a joint probability density function model of consumers' initial value perception and perceived differences is constructed. Combined with the different behavioral characteristics of consumers in the daily sales stage and promotion stage， the purchase probability，positive（negative） comment probability and returns probability of consumers in the daily sales stage are given.At the same time， the sensitivity of consumers to positive and negative comments is integrated into the model construction， considering the impact of consumer comments in the previous stage on consumers' initial value perception of products in the next stage， the purchase probability and return probability of products in the promotion stage are obtained. The newsboy model is used to build two-stage expected profit models under different comment improvement strategies for online sellers to determine product prices， price discount rates and order quantities. Then， the influence of comment improvement strategy on sellers' optimal decision and profit under stochastic demand is studied by numerical analysis. The results show that： the increase in the effort level of praise encouragement will increase the sales price and discount rate， the increase of the cashback amount of positive comments will reduce the optimal pricing slightly， and the commodity discount will increase first and then decrease. The improvement strategy will make the discount rate tend to be stable under different parameter values. The optimal order quantity in the promotion stage is positively correlated with the effort level of praise encouragement， while the optimal order quantity may increase or decrease with the cashback amount.The pricing and ordering decision of a seller who sells products in two stages under different comment improvement strategies is studied.Considering the uncertainty of product demand， the influence mechanism of comment improvement strategy and consumer return on the optimal decision is analyzed， which provides a new perspective for the study of comment improvement strategy and returns.

Key words: comment improvement, return goods, pricing and ordering decision, two-stage sales, stochastic demand