Analysis of Corporate Sales Strategies in the Presence of Resale Platforms

Abstract

The existence of resale platforms may have a certain cannibalization effect on firms' profits. Using Xiaomi phones as a research object, a two-stage model is developed based on the heterogeneity of consumer preferences for new and old products, with resale platforms only appearing in stage 2. We compare and analyze the maximum profits of electronic durable goods enterprises with direct sales and monopoly on new products under three different forms of resale platforms, i.e., only third-party C2C resale platform, B2C resale platform under enterprise trade-in, and enterprise's own C2C resale platform, to decide whether and how to enter the resale platform and the optimal pricing of products. In the second stage of the study, it was found that in general, enterprises choose to enter the resale platform, and as the price of product 1 in the first stage, the unit cost of product 2 in the second stage and the degree of loss of Second-hand product 1 increase, the optimal entry mode of enterprises changes from the B2C resale platform under trade-in to the self-owned C2C resale platform.