Open Access

Johannes Wagner

• The continuous growth of e-commerce combined with new developments in mobile technology make it vital for sporting goods retailers to look for strategies to increase their online competitiveness. Dynamic pricing is a powerful strategy to increase revenue and at the same time ensure price competitiveness. With this in mind, the aim of this thesis is to explore revenue maximization in e-commerce sporting goods retail through dynamic pricing of product inventories. To do so, a multi-method approach was performed using three parts, namely a literature review on e-commerce sporting goods retail and various dynamic pricing strategies, an analysis of empirical sales data, and an interview segment amongst experts from e-commerce sporting goods retail. The research in this thesis has produced two key findings. In theory, inventory and demand-based dynamic pricing is the optimal choice for revenue maximization of product inventories in e-commerce sporting goods retail. In practice, inventory and demand-based dynamic pricing can only be used for revenue maximization of clearance inventories. The reason for this is because the multichannel pricing strategies used by sporting goods retailers prohibit inventory and demand-based pricing of all product inventories in e-commerce. Future research should seek to combine multichannel pricing strategies with dynamic pricing, and doing so would enable e-commerce sporting goods retailers to exploit the full potential of revenue maximization through dynamic pricing of product inventories.