Local brick-and-mortar (B&M) retail stores have traditionally served customers only in a proximal geographic area with their existing operations from a physical store. Emerging online-to-offline (O2O) third-party platforms allow the local B&M stores to increase their consumer base by offering online ordering and delivery services (which we refer to as platform mode). To implement online retailing, a store can also choose to build all the online retail and delivery capabilities by itself (self-building mode), or outsource order-taking to the third-party platform but provide self-built delivery service to customers (mixed mode). We analytically investigate when a local B&M store should adopt an O2O strategy, and the conditions under which each of the three modes is optimal. We show that a store should implement the O2O strategy only when the market is partially covered, or when the market is fully covered and the store's delivery cost is sufficiently low. We fully characterize the optimal mode of operations based on the delivery cost threshold. Interestingly, we find that the self-building and mixed modes dominate the platform mode when the store offers uniform pricing for both online and B&M store customers. We also propose a novel cooperation mechanism that can improve both the platform's and the local B&M store's profits. Additionally, with the proposed cooperation mechanism, the platform mode dominates the mixed mode.

传统上，本地实体零售（B＆M）零售店仅在实体店的现有业务中为近端地理区域的客户提供服务。新兴的线上到线下（O2O）第三方平台允许本地B＆M商店通过提供在线订购和交付服务（我们称为平台模式）来扩大其消费者基础。为了实施在线零售，商店还可以选择自行构建所有在线零售和交付功能（自行构建模式），或者将接单服务外包给第三方平台，但向客户提供自行构建的交付服务（混合）模式）。我们分析性地研究了当地的B＆M商店何时应采用O2O策略，以及三种模式中的每一种都处于最佳状态的条件。我们表明，仅在部分覆盖市场或完全覆盖市场且商店的交付成本足够低时，商店才应实施O2O策略。我们根据交付成本阈值全面描述最佳运营模式。有趣的是，当商店为在线和B＆M商店客户提供统一定价时，我们发现自建模式和混合模式主导了平台模式。我们还提出了一种新颖的合作机制，可以提高平台和本地B＆M商店的利润。此外，通过提出的合作机制，平台模式主导了混合模式。