Advance-selling strategies under platform competition

With the competition between e-commerce platforms intensifying, advance-selling has gradually become a mainstream marketing strategy. This article establishes a mathematical model of competition between two platforms and retailers, considering four scenarios: spot-sale only, advance-selling only, spot-sale with coupons, advance-selling with coupons. The study explores the impact mechanism of platform competition on advance-selling strategies. The results show that when the advantage of product evaluation is large, the unit transaction cost is small or the product cost is low, the retailers should actively adopt the advance-selling scheme with discount pricing. Compared with low-value products, high-value products are priced higher and have greater demand, which can bring higher revenue to the retailers and the platforms. The benefits of the advance-selling scheme are limited, but the issuance of coupons could increase the revenue of both platforms and retailers, and the value of platform coupons in the spot-sale market is higher. JEL Classification: L81, C79