A (Q,R) inventory model with a drop-shipping option for e-business

Moutaz Khouja and Antonis C. Stylianou

Omega, 2009, vol. 37, issue 4, 896-908

Abstract: Drop shipping is used by online as well as traditional retailers as an order fulfillment strategy. A retailer simply forwards customers' orders to the manufacturer or a distributor who fills the orders directly to the customers and is paid a predetermined price by the retailer. For the retailer, advantages of drop shipping include lower holding, handling, and shortage costs. Disadvantages include increased per-unit cost, fragmented order delivery when a single customer order involves products from different manufacturers, longer delivery times, and increased order processing cost. In this paper, we develop two (Q,R) inventory models that allow a retailer to use the drop-shipping option in case of a shortage during lead-time. In the first model, the units short are backordered whereas in the second model sales are lost. We provide closed-form results for exponential and uniform demand distributions. We perform numerical sensitivity analysis and illustrate the results with numerical examples.

Keywords: Inventory; control; Operations; management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305-0483(08)00083-2
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jomega:v:37:y:2009:i:4:p:896-908

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

Access Statistics for this article

Omega is currently edited by B. Lev

More articles in Omega from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().