This paper studies the selection of selling modes in a monopolistic and a competitive supply chain circumstance, where each supply chain comprises a supplier and an e-platform. The e-platform usually acts as a product reseller or serves as an online marketplace. The former is referred to as a reselling mode where the order fulfillment cost is paid by the supplier, and the latter is named as an agency selling mode where the platform pays for the order fulfillment cost. Motivated by the industrial cases, three power structures are utilized to capture the veridical market pricing. We find that the platform and the supplier’s selling mode strategies conflict in a great majority of cases, except for the region in which both the platform agency fee and the order fulfillment cost are moderate. The players can coordinate by Pareto improvement, and the improved result shows that the optimal selling modes are a reselling mode in the fierce competitive supply chain circumstance and agency selling mode in the monopolistic circumstance or the mild competitive circumstance. Surprisingly, adopting a reselling mode is not only a better choice than adopting an agency selling mode in the fierce competitive supply chain circumstance, but this makes the supply chain obtain more of a payoff than in the monopolistic circumstance. Furthermore, it is worth noting that each player choosing an agency selling mode will result in a “prisoner’s dilemma” in the competitive supply chain circumstance, where both players can obtain more payoffs with a reselling mode. In addition, the willingness of platforms and suppliers to play the role of “reseller” is the strongest under the ps structure and the weakest in the ss structure.

PurposeWith the development of e-commerce and mobile payment, platform sales become unstoppable, and many manufacturers also encroach on online market by establishing direct selling channels. Channel conflict intensifies in online market and quality differentiation and is widely used in business practice as an effective way to alleviate such a competition. The authors study a retail platform's sales strategy and interactions with an upstream manufacturer's encroachment strategy in this paper. Unlike most online marketplace and encroachment research, product quality selection is also engaged in the present research to capture the motivation above.Design/methodology/approachThe authors analyze a game-theoretical model that the platform as the first/second mover participates in strategic decision-making, and then jointly decides the product quality level with manufacturer.FindingsThe authors find that encroachment always profits the manufacturer and almost hurts the platform. Interestingly, the first-mover advantage can help the platform guide the manufacturer encroachment and promote a “win–win” situation when product quality level is relatively slight or obvious. Nevertheless, the second-mover advantage can help the platform alleviate the profit loss caused by encroachment when product quality level is moderate. Furthermore, suffered from encroachment loss, the platform can make a credible threat by sales termination to restrain manufacturer encroachment.Originality/valueThis paper innovatively explores the strategic interaction between manufacturer encroachment and quality differentiation in a platform supply chain, and further analyzes the first-mover advantage in this interaction, which fills the gaps of previous platform research and has great significances to enterprise production and operational decision in business practice.