Authors : Purba Daru Kusuma and Andrew Brian Osmond
Abstract: Nowadays, e-Marketplace such as Tokopedia, Bukalapak or Blibli plays significant role in the rise of e-Commerce in Indonesia. Unfortunately because of its free competition nature, price war cannot be avoided. In one side, this condition is good for customers. In the other side, merchant is difficult to make sustainable profit. So, long term growth for e-Commerce, especially in Indonesia cannot be guaranteed. Based on this problem in this research, we propose virtual merchant model that offer same products from joined merchants, so that, fierce competition can be avoided. In this research, rather than concerning only in price, delivery cost and stock size are also, parameters that are concerned. We propose three models: least cost model, two-step model and score based model. These models performance then will be compared to each other and with the conventional least price model. Based on the simulation data, these proposed models perform better in making equity among merchants rather than conventional least price model. The two-step model performs the best in reducing the gap. In the other side, the conventional least price model performs the worst one. Meanwhile, the least cost model and the score based model perform moderate result with the least cost model is slightly better than the score based model.
Purba Daru Kusuma and Andrew Brian Osmond, 2018. Virtual Merchant Model in e-Marketplace System. Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 13: 6173-6180.