Supply chain inventory plays an increasingly important role in rising prosperity and flexible retail industry. The retail industry’s own characteristics determine the importance of the inventory. The inventory management has played an important role in reducing the cost of supply chain and the whole supply chain coordination and stability. This paper takes the consumer internal psychological preference as the starting point. Data are obtained through market research on consumer internal psychological preference and consumer sensitivity of the inventory. Based on the internal psychological preferences of consumers, the correlation among product quality, product price, and consumer behavior of the three potential variables is analyzed. This paper constructs the structural equation model of consumer behavior and inventory sensitivity, and puts forward the main issues and improvement measures to the retail industry inventory.
Consumer Psychological Preference Retail Industry Inventory1. Introduction
In recent years, with the continuous development of economy, people’s living standards continue to improve; the purchase of retail products frequently increases; and the competition among retailers is also growing. To provide customers with high quality service and low price of high quality products becomes more and more important in the competition of retail enterprises. But at the same time, reducing internal management costs has become the key of retail enterprise internal management. The procurement costs, purchase costs and quality costs all have an intimate relationship with inventory management [1] . On the one hand, strengthening internal inventory management of retail enterprise reduces management costs, avoiding the dilemma of “profits are eaten by warehouse”. On the other hand, it can be able to meet consumers demand for the product, and ensure the long-term development of the retail enterprise.
Strengthening the coordination of every node enterprise in supply chain is the focus of many scholars study. VIM (Vendor Inventory Management), JMI (Jointly Managed Inventory) and CPFR (Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment) are all advanced and effective methods of inventory management. JMI emphasizes the participation of each node in the supply chain, so that each inventory management in the supply chain can be considered from the coordination. CPFR focuses on the mutual cooperation between the other management and inventory management [2] . These management methods are all solved the problem of the inventory from the perspective of supply chain management. In recent years, some scholars have studied from different angles on the supply chain inventory management. Vishal Gaur (2003) through the 1987 to 2000 survey of 311 retail companies found that the price of product, the type of product and the life cycle of product have a huge impact on product inventory [3] . Therefore, we should take some measures for the different characteristics of different inventory products, so that we can accurately grasp the market demand, and improve the response rate to reduce the number of products not sold.
The above research shows the supply chain inventory management from the point of each node of supply chain and product characteristics. But at the same time, consumer’s behavior and demand as well as the most important factors affect retail enterprise inventories. This paper takes the consumer internal psychological preference as the starting point, exploring its impact on the retail enterprise inventories from the perspective of consumer behavior, by accurately grasping the consumer demand to supply products.
2. Research Model2.1. Analysis of Consumer Internal Psychological Preference
Kollat (1968) consider consumer behavior composed of consumers’ purchase decision and purchase action [4] . Purchase decision is the process of the formation of consumer attitudes, which is a psychological activity and behavior tendency to the products you want to buy. Purchases action is the implementation process of consumer purchase decisions. Purchasing decisions caused the action of purchase, and the effect of purchases also have an impact on the next purchase decision, both mutual penetration and influence. Lilien (1992) dividing the process of consumer purchase decision into five stages, there are need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase behavior [5] . Habits, needs motivation, inner conviction, purchase intent, evaluation and other factors will have an impact on purchasing decisions and the following buying behavior. This paper mainly studies the subjective factors that affect consumer behavior, which is primarily associated with consumers motivation, attitude, perception and other factors. These factors have an influence on consumer purchase decision, so it will change consumers’ behavior.
2.2. The Problems of Inventory Management That Exist in the Retail Industry2.2.1. Poor Coordination between the Internal Departments of Enterprise
In our country’s retail enterprises, purchasing department, sales department, and inventory management department have less internal communication and coordination, which lead to the phenomenon that procurement and sales out of touch. Purchasing departments cannot understand the needs of the market at the first time, the sales department cannot well understand the inventory of the products to develop targeted marketing plan, and the inventory management department can’t timely and effective oversight the purchasing products.
2.2.2. The Situation of Shortage of Products Is Common
Shortages were divided into two types, one is the enterprise did not have the product that consumers demand, and the other one is inventory have no sufficient products. Both cases are generated from the underestimated to consumer demand. And facing to the situation of shortage, only thirty percent of consumers will choose to buy alternatives, most consumers will choose to buy it in the other place. Therefore, the shortage problem is the major problem of inventory management that existing in the retail enterprise.
2.2.3. Inventory Backlog Serious
The unsold products lead to the inventory backlog. Product price is too high, have no competitive advantage in similar products, product display position is not perfect caused consumer’s attention shifted, and out-of-season products are not taking away in time, both of them are all the reason of unsold. As the same of shortage, the underestimated to consumer demand is the main reason of inventory backlog.
2.3. The Selection of Indicators and the Building of the Model
The theoretical model of this study is shown in Figure 1, the consumer quality preference, consumer price preference, and consumer convenient-service preference are external latent variables, consumer inventory sensitivity is internal latent variable. In the dimension of consumer quality preference include four measured variables that describe its characteristics. In the dimension of consumer price preference include four measured variables that describe its characteristics. In the dimension of consumer convenient-service preference include seven measured variables that describe its characteristic.
3. Collection and Collation of the Model’s Data3.1. The Design of the Questionnaire
This study aimed at consumers’ internal psychological preferences, using a questionnaire to quantify the data. Converting abstraction of mental preference index into
The theory model of relationship between consumer internal psychological preference and inventory sensitivity
popular intuitive to measure psychological preferences of consumers. As shown in Table 1, the questionnaire is divided into three parts, the first part is the basic information of consumers, which qualified the basic situation of the investigator, in order to ensure the reasonableness of the questionnaire. The second part is the specific measurement items of exogenous variables. The third part is the measurement items of internal variables. According to the difference of preference degree, using Liken five scale to quantify the index from 1 - 5. In the process of questionnaire setting to fully consider the integrity, semantic precision and logic.
3.2. Data Collection
Distributing the questionnaire in the 5 District of Anshan city in Liaoning Province with the method of random sampling. Reference statistical relevant principles, requires of the questionnaire and the limit number of questionnaire. Filling in each questionnaire for 10 to 15 minutes [6] , grant 400 questionnaires and 386 shares of effective questionnaire altogether, the rate of the effective questionnaire is 96.5%.
3.3. The Analysis of Reliability and Validity
Analysis of reliability and validity of the model is a necessary step to test the accuracy of the model. In this paper, analysis of reliability and validity mainly include: first of all, analyzing overall reliability of the scale and removing the item which is not conform to the standard, preliminary purification of the scale. Then, followed by the exploratory factor analysis with the method of principal component analysis, and eliminating the item that have Structural problems. Finally, analyze reliability of each structure variables respectively, and further optimized the scale.
3.3.1. The Integral Reliability Analysis of the Model
Reliability is the analysis and test of stability and credibility of the data. Cronbach’s Alpha reliability coefficient is mainly used to analyze the internal reliability of the model, using the variance, the covariance matrix and the correlation matrix of items calculate the internal consistency reliability coefficient, which is one of the most commonly methods of reliability analysis [7] . This paper use the SPSS_21.0 to analyze CITC (Corrected Item Total Correlation) and Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient of the model. The reliability level is perfect when Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient is greater than 0.7 and it is better when the reliability level is 0.65 to 0.7.
As it shown in Table 2, by the analysis of SPSS_21.0, the integral reliability coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.686, which is greater than 0.65 but less than 0.7. In order to further improve the integral reliability of the model, eliminating the item that CITC < 0.4 and Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient will increase when it is deleted. The items of the shelf of products and the distance of buying were deleted.
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