Financing strategy in fresh product supply chains under e-commerce environment

The popularity of e-commerce motivates more and more retailers to open the online channel. This paper investigates a fresh product supply chain consisting of a supplier and a capital-constrained retailer under three cases: bank loans, delayed payment, and dual financing, where the retailer sells via online and offline channels. For each financing mechanism, we construct the optimization model and obtain the optimal freshness and pricing decisions. It is found that, the capital constraint always reduces the supplier's profit, but can improve the retailer's profit. Comparative results show that, the delayed payment produces the highest freshness level when interest rate of supplier is lower than that of bank, and the dual financing mode could produce the highest supply chain profit. The extension reveals that, the supplier tends to charge no interest under delayed payment and dual financing to maximize its profit.