E-commerce sales rise exponentially and represent an increasing proportion of global retail. To benefit from this, traditional brick-and-mortar stores enter the e-commerce market and become omnichannel retailers. However, the profitability of omnichannel retailers remains questionable due to high shipment and fulfillment costs. This paper addresses this challenge, focusing on using standard shipping contracts as a potential solution. Such contracts promise delivery within a given number of periods. Once a customer orders, the retailer should set a delivery period. In this way, retailers are flexible in setting exact delivery days, providing an opportunity for jointly optimizing product replenishment and customer fulfillment. We provide a generic model for the use of standard shipping contracts and formulate it as a Markov decision process. We provide optimal solutions using a modified policy iteration algorithm. Our results show that using standard shipping contracts creates a win-win situation: It increases profits and customer service. The observed profit increase is directly linked to maintaining less on-hand inventory. This effect is more pronounced for higher valued products and longer replenishment lead times. Additionally, we propose a heuristic policy that performs within 4% of the optimal policy.

中文翻译：

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为具有标准运输合同的全渠道零售商提供最佳履行和补货


电子商务销售额呈指数级增长，在全球零售业中所占的比例越来越大。为了从中受益，传统的实体店进入电子商务市场并成为全渠道零售商。然而，由于运输和配送成本高昂，全渠道零售商的盈利能力仍然值得怀疑。本白皮书解决了这一挑战，重点介绍了使用标准运输合同作为潜在的解决方案。此类合同承诺在给定的期限内交货。客户下单后，零售商应设置交货期。通过这种方式，零售商可以灵活地设置确切的交货日期，从而为共同优化产品补货和买家履行提供机会。我们提供了一个使用标准航运合同的通用模型，并将其制定为马尔可夫决策过程。我们使用修改后的策略迭代算法提供最优解决方案。我们的结果表明，使用标准运输合同可以创造双赢局面： 它增加了利润和客户服务。观察到的利润增长与保持较少的现有库存直接相关。对于价值较高的产品和较长的补货交货时间，这种影响更为明显。此外，我们提出了一个启发式策略，其执行范围在最佳策略的 4% 以内。