The impacts of market size and data-driven marketing on the sales mode selection in an Internet platform based supply chain

This study investigates a platform’s preferences between agency selling and reselling considering the impact of data-driven marketing (DDM). Four models are built: No-DDM+agency selling, No-DDM+reselling, DDM+agency selling, DDM+reselling. Sales volumes, profits and profit growth rates in different sales modes are compared. Results show that with an increase in DDM efficiency, the platform is more willing to adopt the reselling mode. In addition, without DDM, the sales mode with higher sales volume is not more profitable within a certain market size. DDM can help avoid this phenomenon to a certain extent.