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Price Masking Strategy of Cross-Border E-Commerce Platform Financing

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Abstract

E-commerce platform financing is a new service pattern of supply chain finance. However, this pattern may bring some new issues when considering the problem of cash flow shortage and financing difficulties of small and medium-sized enterprises. When enterprises use this service, they worry about the leakage of preferential wholesale price when applying the full loan amount and providing the true transaction information. Based on the model consisting of a supplier, a retailer and a cross-border e-commerce platform, the authors design a price masking strategy to prevent the retailer’s preferential wholesale price information from leakage. The authors analyze the profit of the retailer and the platform before and after adopting the price masking strategy. The authors find that the price masking strategy always benefits the retailer. Besides, the optimal profit of the retailer and the platform are both affected by the loan interest rate. Moreover, there exists a range of loan interest rates that can benefit both the retailer and the platform if the price masking strategy is adopted. The research emphasizes that platform can expand the total business volume by allowing retailers to use price masking strategy. In other words, there will be more and more retailers attracted by the strategy, which benefits the long-term growth of cross-border e-commerce platform financing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Jianbin Li, Zhouxin Hang & Shan Xiao

  2. School of Economics and Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Zhiyuan Chen

Authors
  1. Jianbin Li
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  2. Zhouxin Hang
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  3. Zhiyuan Chen
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  4. Shan Xiao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhiyuan Chen.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Additional information

This paper was supported by the Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 71831007, the General Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 72071085 and 71871166, High-End Foreign Expert Recruitment Plan under Grant No. G2022154004L and Huazhong University of Science and Technology Double First-Class Funds for Humanities and Social Sciences under Grant No. 2021WKFZZX008.

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Li, J., Hang, Z., Chen, Z. et al. Price Masking Strategy of Cross-Border E-Commerce Platform Financing. J Syst Sci Complex 37, 668–691 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11424-024-2164-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11424-024-2164-x

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