Price Masking Strategy of Cross-Border E-Commerce Platform Financing

E-commerce platform financing is a new service pattern of supply chain finance. However, this pattern may bring some new issues when considering the problem of cash flow shortage and financing difficulties of small and medium-sized enterprises. When enterprises use this service, they worry about the leakage of preferential wholesale price when applying the full loan amount and providing the true transaction information. Based on the model consisting of a supplier, a retailer and a cross-border e-commerce platform, the authors design a price masking strategy to prevent the retailer’s preferential wholesale price information from leakage. The authors analyze the profit of the retailer and the platform before and after adopting the price masking strategy. The authors find that the price masking strategy always benefits the retailer. Besides, the optimal profit of the retailer and the platform are both affected by the loan interest rate. Moreover, there exists a range of loan interest rates that can benefit both the retailer and the platform if the price masking strategy is adopted. The research emphasizes that platform can expand the total business volume by allowing retailers to use price masking strategy. In other words, there will be more and more retailers attracted by the strategy, which benefits the long-term growth of cross-border e-commerce platform financing.