Comparisons of sales modes for a fresh product supply chain with freshness-keeping effort

This paper develops a supplier-retailer fresh product supply chain under three sales modes: retail mode, dual-channel mode, and O2O (Online-to-Offline) mode. For each mode, the optimal pricing and freshness-keeping decisions are investigated. It is shown that, in decentralized systems, the dual-channel mode could outperform the O2O mode for the supplier, while the retailer prefers O2O mode to retail mode and dual-channel mode. Under coordination, the O2O mode brings the highest supply chain profit; for consumer surplus, the dual-channel mode is not always better than the retail mode, but is always inferior to the O2O mode.