Integrating point-of-sale financing into the coordination of a price and credit dependent e-commerce supply chain

This paper investigates the decision-making and coordination of an e-commerce supply chain (ECSC) consisting of manufacturers – e-commerce (EC) platform-consumers. Demand is assumed price and credit-dependent. The credit is granted to the consumers by using a point-of-sale (POS) financing service provided by a third-party company. To integrate the credit into the ECSC, we constructed two decentralized decision-making models of Platform-POS credit and Manufacturer-POS credit, and a centralized decision-making model. In the basic scenario, that is with one manufacturer and when the POS company is in a competitive credit market, we can then explicitly solve the optimal decisions (the credit time, the platform's charge, and the product price), and for each model derive the optimal profits. Next, a comparative analysis of the equilibria across the different models is conducted. Analytical results show that the Manufacturer POS credit results in longer credit time and higher profits for both the manufacturer and the platform when compared with Platform-POS credit. Further, we propose a sharing agreement where the manufacturer and the platform share together the cost of the credit to coordinate the supply chain. In the extended scenario with multiple manufacturers, we found that the degree of competition among manufacturers critically moderates the selection of an optimal credit model for the manufacturers and platform. Moreover, numerical examples show that the results derived in the competition credit market still hold in a monopolistic credit market. Overall, our results shed light for the supply chain managers on how to select the most appropriate credit strategy.