Strategy design of fresh e-commerce pre-warehouse based on mass customization

Abstract

Pre-warehouse is the last link in the delivery process of fresh e-commerce. The purchase link of pre-warehouse needs to balance two contradictory goals: meeting the diverse individual needs of customers and reducing the delivery cost through scale. The idea of mass customization is a trade-off between economy of scope and economy of scale. Based on this idea, this paper constructs a mass customization model, and formulates the purchase strategy for the pre-warehouse based on the prediction of customer demand, so as to maximize the long-term profit of enterprise. Through the simulation experiment, this paper compares the comprehensive performance of the mass customization model with five other contrastive strategy models: the highest satisfaction strategy, the demand priority strategy, the lowest purchasing price strategy, the highest selling price strategy and the highest gross margin strategy. Experimental results show that no matter how the parameters change, the mass customization model performs better than other models. What’s more, when the demand forecast is accurate, the substitutability between commodities is strong, and the delivery cost is high, the mass customization model has biggest advantage over other strategy models. The main innovation of this paper is introducing the idea of mass customization in pre-warehouse purchase problem, which not only expands the scope of application of mass customization, but also proposes a stably better and appliable pre-warehouse purchase strategy.