Decision-Making of Electronic Commerce Supply Chain considering EW Service

Table 2

Description of notations.

Notations	Description
	The sales price of the seller
	The fixed fee paid by the seller for the technical service provided by the e-platform in the selling period
	The commission rate, . is the total commission charged by e-platform
	The service level provided by the e-platform for selling products. According to Wang and Li [35] and Pokharel and Liang [36], this paper assumes that the sales service cost function satisfies , where is the service cost coefficient
	The unit cost of providing EW service in the warranty period
	EW price
	Market demand for products is greatly affected by sales price and service level. Based on the study of Wu [37] and Otrodi et al. [38], this paper assumes that the demand function (the form of market demand function with the sales price in existing studies includes power function [39, 40], inverse demand function [41], and linear demand function [38]. In this paper, we use the linear demand function which can reflect that demand decreases with sales price and increases with service level [22, 23]) is , in which, refers to the market saturation, is the sales price elasticity, and represents the service level elasticity. The larger the value in and , the more the demand is affected. implies that consumers are more sensitive to price than service
	Market demand for EW: this demand only emerges from consumers who purchased products. Thus, the highest demand for EW is equal to the highest demand for products without sales service. Meanwhile, the product sales price is also the main factor affecting EW demand (the price elasticity coefficient is the same in both product demand function and EW demand function). Referring to Klaussner and Hendrickson [42], this paper assumes that the EW period is an exogenous constant and the EW demand function is . is the elasticity coefficient of EW price. The larger the value in , the more the demand for EW service is affected. Without the loss of feasibility, is required, which restricts that there is no big gap between consumers’ sensitivity coefficients to the product price and the EW price
Remarks	To simplify the calculations, this study assumes and . The sales function can be simplified as , and the EW service demand and the cost function of the e-platform are and , respectively. Meanwhile, it is assumed that , which indicates that consumers are more sensitive to price than service