Abstract: In recent years, the tremendous growth of the e-commerce industry are witnessed by us, and a large number of manufacturers who produce fresh products have started to sell through online platforms (e.g., JD.com and Tmall). In practice, the online platforms can choose to act as online marketplaces for the manufacturers (i.e., agency selling). Under this selling format, the manufacturers participate on the platforms by paying a proportional fee and directly sell their products to customers at a selling price. Besides, the platforms can also act as resellers for the manufacturers (i.e., reselling). Under this selling format, the manufacturers sell their products to the platforms at a wholesale price and then the platforms sell the products to customers at a selling price. This raises an important question of which selling format should both the online platforms and the manufacturers adopt. In fresh-product e-commerce supply chains, the upstream manufacturers often need to determine the optimal production levels by incurring costs, and the costs are uncertain to the downstream online platforms. The platforms thus cannot infer the qualification rate and will carry out sampling test to improve the quality level of the products, although the platforms fail to find out all unqualified products. Moreover, if the agency selling (reselling) format is employed, the manufacturers (online platforms) would improve the freshness of the products by incurring costs as much as possible. It is investigated how the production costs’ information asymmetry and the accuracy of the sampling test affect the selling format selections of the platforms and manufacturers.

Key words: freshe-commerce; cost information asymmetry; quality inspection; sales mode choice