Discounts as marketing strategies for O2O platform—the case of Eleme

Sammanfattning: With the development of the Internet and online payment, Online to Offline (O2O) platforms come into people’s lives. O2O platforms provide offline goods and ser-vices for their online users and these platforms are various, for example, they can help the users to call taxis, order food, call babysitters, make orders for cleaning the car and so on, which help people a lot for its convenience. At the same time, attracting customers for these platforms becomes a problem and many of these choose to make discount strategies to reach their goals. Companies invest a lot of money on discounts for competition while investment sometimes is risky, because the company maybe cannot earn the money back, so it is very important to learn how to make discount strategies for O2O platform wisely.Eleme will be studied as the case of this study, because it is a successful example of developing its food delivery O2O platform through investing a lot of money on giving discounts to attract lots of users. Eleme is one of the best food delivery O2O platforms in China, and its users are quite many, so it is a suitable choice to investigate. A mixed method is used in this study. Interviews have been done on commercial tenants of Eleme and questionnaires have been sent to ordinary end-users of Eleme, and the combination of these two parts can lead to good dis-count strategies. To answer the questions of the thesis, relevant knowledge about O2O platform, market strategies, discount strategies, consumer behavior and measures taken by Eleme will be used.The result of this study shows that discounts of the O2O platform do attract lots of customers and giving discounts is a good way to be competitive. At the same time, the platform needs to balance the profits of itself and its commercial tenants, and pays attention to needs of the ordinary end-users behind discounts in case of los-ing them. Eleme used a lot of wise discount strategies to develop itself, but the competition in this area is continuing and many measures can be taken for further development.