Abstract:Customers’returning products is very common in online retailing and it significantly impacts on the seller’s operations decisions. In this paper,we investigate an online retailer who simultaneously determines the retail price and order quantity while experiencing customer returns and price dependent stochastic demand with a multiplicative mode. We assume that the customer’s returned product quantity is a function of both the quantity sold and the price and the online retailer’s operations can be either single or multi-period with and without uncertainty in demand. We analytically derive results for optimal prices and order quantities under certainty demand in both the single and multi-period situations and demonstrate the unique solution existence in the single period stochastic situation. For the multi-period stochastic demand situation,we numerically analyze how the firm should change prices and inventory quantities in order to mitigate the negative effects of returns from customers in the stochastic demand situation. We also model the online retailer’s expected profit with mean-variance to examine the change of the expected revenue with customer’s returns. The risk preference of a retailer has a significant impact on the retailer’s optimal decisions with customer’s returns.