Channel Selection and Product Configuration Strategies of the Brander in Heterogeneous E-Commerce Platforms Under Consumption Subsidies

With the rise in social channels, branders have gained more sales opportunities, but at the same time, they have to face practical challenges such as channel introductions, product configuration, and product pricing. Although existing studies have discussed branders’ product configuration, most of them confine product differentiation strategies to homogeneous e-commerce platforms, overlook the heterogeneity between traditional and social platforms, and rarely consider the impact of consumption subsidies. To this end, we consider a supply chain consisting of a brander and two heterogeneous e-commerce platforms. By incorporating both single and differentiated-product configurations, we developed a sequential Stackelberg game model to analyze the brander’s optimal channel introduction, product configuration, and pricing strategies under government consumption subsidies. Under the model settings and assumptions of this paper, we derive the following findings: (1) when the quality of the general product is relatively high, the brander achieves higher profits after introducing social channels; (2) when the commission rate is high and the quality of the high-level product falls within a specific threshold, the brander achieves the maximum profit under the single-product strategy; (3) when the proportion of fans is high, the profit of the social platform is higher than that of the traditional platform; (4) when the quality of high-level products is relatively low, the platform supply chain can achieve Pareto optimality by adopting the single-product configuration. This paper elucidates the strategic roles of product configuration and consumption subsidies in the context of social channel introduction, thereby providing a theoretical basis for branders’ operational decisions and for the government’s formulation of consumption subsidy policies.