While many companies have benefited from online sales as their sole sales channel with the rapid growth of online retailing, this approach has limitations, especially for products that contain non-digital information and require a complementary service to fully attract customers. Sellers of these types of products are actively considering or have already adopted a multichannel strategy, which includes maintaining the existing online channel and opening physical brick-and-mortar stores. To stimulate sales, the service operator may consider offering a product bundle with the product manufacturer by providing subsidies to them. Decisions on product bundling could potentially facilitate or pose barriers to channel expansion. This study employs a game-theoretic model to explore the optimal pricing, multichannel and bundling strategies for a product manufacturer and a service operator who offer the core products with ancillary services in either bundled or non-bundled format. Our equilibrium analysis yields several insights. First, the manufacturer’s offline expansion allows customers who visit in-store to try and inspect the product, which raises not only the offline price but also the manufacturer’s online price. Interestingly, this price increase is more significant for the bundled format compared to the non-bundled format. Second, the bundling strategy influences the manufacturer’s decision to expand into multichannel operations. Specifically, product bundling incentivises multichannel expansion if the newly added physical stores can attract a significant number of new customers, indicating that demand spillover is significant. Conversely, product bundling may deter multichannel expansion if the online hassle cost is moderate.

中文翻译：

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渠道和捆绑销售策略：在产品和服务运营中打造“双赢”模式


虽然随着在线零售的快速增长，许多公司已将在线销售作为其唯一的销售渠道，但这种方法有局限性，特别是对于包含非数字信息并需要补充服务以充分吸引客户的产品。这类商品的卖家正在积极考虑或已经采用多渠道策略，其中包括维持现有的在线渠道和开设实体店。为了刺激销售，服务运营商可以考虑通过向产品制造商提供补贴来提供捆绑商品。关于产品捆绑的决策可能会促进或阻碍渠道扩张。本研究采用博弈论模型，为以捆绑或非捆绑形式提供核心产品和辅助服务的产品制造商和服务运营商探索最佳定价、多渠道和捆绑策略。我们的均衡分析得出了几个见解。首先，制造商的线下扩展允许访问实体店的客户试用和检查产品，这不仅提高了线下价格，也提高了制造商的线上价格。有趣的是，与非捆绑格式相比，捆绑格式的这种价格上涨更为显着。其次，捆绑策略会影响制造商扩展到多渠道运营的决定。具体来说，如果新增加的实体店可以吸引大量新顾客，那么商品捆绑销售会激励多渠道扩张，这表明需求溢出效应很大。相反，如果在线麻烦成本适中，产品捆绑销售可能会阻止多渠道扩张。