ABSTRACT Postponement strategies offer opportunities for firms to achieve effective supply chain management. Postponement strategies could be classified into manufacturing postponement which delays the product differentiation and logistics postponement which delays the distributing process to the confirmed customer orders. In practice, the way to implement manufacturing postponement is more complicated than logistics postponement¡¦s. By employing the logistics postponement strategy, all the firms have to consider is the distribution of finalized products from a centralized inventory to final retailers. Comparing with integrating all the manufacturing activities, logistics postponement strategy could be an effective one for firms to handle the demand uncertainty over the regional markets. By employing the logistics postponement strategy, firms could decrease the cost of inventory and backorder through delaying products distribution to the confirmed customer orders. The connection between real options and postponement is also showed on this point. By employing the real options, decisions could be made when the firms wait and get more information about the market. The value the firms wait to get is also the benefits that logistics postponement strategy could reach by logistics postponement. Thus, the flexibility to decrease the inventory and backorder cost is considered as the management flexibility that real options could evaluate. On the other way, it¡¦s not always free for firms to get such a flexible management ability. The capital that firms have to invest for any change of the supply chain becoming the flexible one could be equal to buying the exercise right in real options. We therefore could construct a model to evaluate the value of logistics postponement strategy via real options and help the firms to judge what would be the proper occasions for logistics postponement to be implemented.

Background: the concept of postponement primarily aims at reducing uncertainty, not to say eliminate it. It is achieved by postponing processes until the required information be- comes available. Although the concept of postponement is not new, its application and connection with e-commerce companies operating on the B2C sector has gained little at- tention. Postponement is presented as having four forms: the full postponement strategy, the logistics postponement strategy, the manufacturing postponement strategy and the full speculation strategy. Although every strategy presents pros and cons, some are more ade- quate given different circumstances. Purpose: the purpose of this study is to explore (1) which factors determine whether e- commerce companies use postponement, and (2) which determinants are responsible for their strategy selection. Method: a qualitative research approach was used, with a multiple-case study as the re- search design. The empirical data was collected through in-depth semi-structured inter- views with four respondents, from four different companies. Conclusion: the authors presented a revised version of the framework they used to con- duct this research. Some determinants, present in the original framework, were removed given the authors’ findings. However, eight of the remaining determinants were kept in the revised version of the framework. The ones concerned were: the volume, the product type, the product range, the value profile, the relative delivery time, the delivery frequency, the uncertainty of demand and the economies of scale. Furthermore, the authors’ findings sug- gested a new determinant should be added to the framework, namely the number of key suppliers. With the help of the framework e-commerce companies can now evaluate their products according to the framework and decide accordingly whether they should apply postponement, and if so, which strategy suits them the best.