Optimal Capacity Decision-Making of Omnichannel Catering Merchants Considering the Service Environment Based on Queuing Theory

Many catering merchants are currently adopting omnichannel sales methods. At a restaurant, customers can place their orders, and while waiting for the food to be completed, they can enjoy the restaurant’s service environment. Online customers, by placing orders on various apps, can skip the queue, increasing their utility by reducing the opportunity cost, but they cannot enjoy the restaurant’s service environment. For merchants, it is important to adequately address how to choose the optimal capacity to provide services to customers in different channels and obtain optimal profits based on the service environment. In this paper, we establish a stylized theoretical model to study the impact of the service environment on customers’ shopping behavior online and offline, and we study how merchants can formulate the optimal capacity. Our main results are as follows: First, improving the service environment was conducive to reducing the merchants’ safety capacity and could help them obtain higher profits. In short-term omnichannel operations, merchants obtained higher profits than in traditional offline single-channel operations. Improving the service environment increased profits, but the profit difference between short-term omnichannel and offline single-channel operations gradually decreased. Finally, in long-term operations, the process of online customers transferring to offline channels based on a high-quality service environment might be detrimental to merchants’ profits.