Commercializing the Package Flow: Cross-Sampling Physical Products Through E-Commerce Warehouses
研究电商仓库跨品牌派发免费样品（如将A品牌样品随B品牌包裹寄出）的效果，发现能显著提升采样品牌的短期和长期销量，且可个性化优化。
Many e-commerce platforms have established their warehouses to facilitate the storage and delivery of packages. This paper studies a novel business practice—cross-sampling through e-commerce warehouses—that allows physical free samples provided by one (sampling) brand to be distributed with the packages of another unrelated (distributing) brand. In close collaboration with Alibaba, we implement cross-sampling through a large-scale field experiment, in which more than 55,000 free samples are distributed, to empirically examine its effectiveness in driving online sales of the sampling brand. First, we find significant increases in store visits and sales of the sampling brand both in the short term and long term up to 14 months afterward. The long-term effect is driven mainly by acquiring customers who did not purchase from the sampling brand to visit the online stores and eventually make a purchase. Second, contrary to the previous literature on within-category free sampling, we find a significant sales increase in both the sampled item and other items, which further spills over to indirect channels. Therefore, cross-sampling can also help promote the sampling brand as a whole. Finally, we illustrate the potential for personalization for cross-sampling. Cross-sampling is more effective for customers who recently viewed related products or just purchased nonessential products from the distributing brand. By taking into account the interaction among brands, items, and customers, we can further improve the profitability of cross-sampling by targeting the “right” packages. Overall, because cross-sampling is scalable, effective, and flexible, we demonstrate the high potential of a new business practice that combines offline logistics control and online information to generate additional business value for customers, brands, and the platform. This paper was accepted by Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz, operations management. Funding: T. Sun acknowledges research support from CKGSB Research Institute, Center for Digital Transformation, and ABRI Grant. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.00902 .