EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Fulfillment by Amazon versus fulfillment by seller: An interpretable risk‐adjusted fulfillment model

Libo Sun, Guodong Lyu, Yugang Yu and Chung‐Piaw Teo

Naval Research Logistics (NRL), 2020, vol. 67, issue 8, 627-645

Abstract: With dual‐channel choices, E‐retailers fulfill their demands by either the inventory stored in third‐party distribution centers, or by in‐house inventory. In this article, using data from a wedding gown E‐retailer in China, we analyze the differences between two fulfillment choices—fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and fulfillment by seller (FBS). In particular, we want to understand the impact of FBA that will bring to sales and profit, compared to FBS, and how the impact is related to product features such as sizes and colors. We develop a risk‐adjusted fulfillment model to address this problem, where the E‐retailer's risk attitude to FBA is incorporated. We denote the profit gaps between FBA and FBS as the rewards for this E‐retailer fulfilling products using FBA, our goal is to maximize the E‐retailer's total rewards using predictive analytics. We adopt the generalized linear model to predict the expected rewards, while controlling for the variability of the reward distribution. We apply our model on a set of real data, and develop an explicit decision rule that can be easily implemented in practice. The numerical experiments show that our interpretable decision rule can improve the E‐retailer's total rewards by more than 35%.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/nav.21897

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:wly:navres:v:67:y:2020:i:8:p:627-645

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Naval Research Logistics (NRL) from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:wly:navres:v:67:y:2020:i:8:p:627-645