The Decision of Freshness and Service Levels in a Dual-Channel Unified-Pricing Fresh E-commerce

In this paper, a two-level supply chain was constructed, consisting of a single fresh agricultural product supplier and a single fresh e-commerce company. The supplier is responsible for the freshness-keeping effort and distribution of the trunk part, while the e-commerce company uses a same-price strategy when selling in dual-channel mode, with end-point preservation and service level as the main channel differences. Supply chain decision models were constructed under centralized and decentralized decision-making, and the impact of consumer demand elasticity for freshness-keeping effort and service level on optimal decision-making was analyzed. Then the factors affecting the gap between optimal decision-making under decentralized and centralized models were explored. Based on the "purchasing compensation-mutual cost sharing" principle, a coordination contract was designed, which can achieve Pareto improvement of the fresh e-commerce supply chain under certain conditions. The article finds that an increase in consumer demand for freshproduct services can improve the decision of the fresh e-commerce supply chain. However, an increase in consumer sensitivity to freshness of the fresh product prompts the supplier and e-commerce company to take different actions based on the difficulty of preserving the fresh food, and always results in a decline in supply chain profit.