Optimized Combination of e-commerce Platform Sales Model and Blockchain Anti-Counterfeit Traceability Service Strategy

Abstract

In the e-commerce market, many e-commerce platforms act as resellers when selling products, and act as agents when selling other products. In the sales process, e-commerce platforms can either build their own blockchain anti-counterfeit traceability platforms or cooperate with third-party blockchain anti-counterfeit traceability platforms. This will generate four scenarios: (a) reseller, building its own platform (RE); (b) reseller, cooperating with a third-party platform (RO); (c) agent, building its own platform (ME); (d) agent, cooperating with a third-party platform (MO). Therefore, this paper constructs a differential game model under four modes to explore the interaction between the choice of sales mode and the choice of anti-counterfeit traceability service strategy. The results show that suppliers’ profits are influenced by various aspects. On the one hand, in small-scale markets, the situation in which suppliers can realize higher profits evolves from ME to RO as the wholesale price increases, and in large-scale markets, suppliers are more profitable in the ME mode. On the other hand, with the increase of market scale and the decrease of unit price of anti-counterfeit traceability service of third-party platform, the situation that suppliers can achieve higher profit evolves from RE to RO and then to RE. For e-commerce platform, self-built platform is a better choice. In the small-scale market, as the market size increases, the cost performance of anti-counterfeit traceability service decreases, and the best choice for e-commerce platform evolves from resale to agency sales, and in the large-scale market, the best choice for e-commerce platform is resale.