Electronic Commerce Research最新文献

In the realm of smart homes, a smart speaker functions as the central control hub, seamlessly connecting platforms, consumers, and manufacturers. The emerging smart home platforms such as T-Mall and Amazon face the trade-off between quality investment of such IoT product which exhibits two-sided network externalities as well as expanding the smart ecosystem. This paper first extracts consumers’ functional preferences from online review data and then constructs an analytical model based on two-sided market to explore the interplay between quality investment and two-sided pricing decisions. This paper carries out a full analysis of three distinct settings: monopoly, duopoly, and partial multihoming. The conclusions indicate that when one side benefits from network externalities, the platform should not reduce the charges to the other side; In cases where consumers are single-homing while manufacturers are multihoming, the platform can subsidize both sides and reap commission revenues. However, in multihoming scenarios, the interdependence between the platform's two sides diminishes, rendering the subsidy strategy potentially inefficient. The success of this strategy hinges on consumers' varying preferences for standalone value and ecosystem effect. This research enriches two-sided market theory and furnishes practical guidance for platforms navigating quality investment and pricing decisions within the smart home industry.

Retail is one of the sectors that Metaverse will strongly implicate. Given the hypothetical convergence of physical and the Metaverse shopping experiences, retailers in grocery segment must identify and forecast opportunities and emerging challenges to achieve a competitive advantage with appropriate marketing strategies. By anchoring in the brick-and-mortar context, the present paper discusses the sources of competitive advantage for grocery segment retailers in the Metaverse, highlighting differences and similarities with the traditional retail context. Moreover, following a marketing perspective, a research agenda is presented, looking at the retail sources of competitive advantage in the Metaverse.

The popularity of live-streaming (LS) has enforced a great number of e-retailers to introduce such an emerging e-commerce mode. Considering the potential benefits brought by LS e-commerce and the various modes for introducing such a strategy, this study examines three possible modes of LS in a competitive context, namely without LS, third-party LS, and self-run LS. By using a stylized game-theoretical model, we explore the impacts of such a selling strategy on both online and offline retailers’ decisions and profits. Our findings show that when the consumer’s hassle cost for LS shopping is low, the LS selling always results in a price-increase effect on the online retailer, while only the third-party LS would have the same effect on the offline retailer. Moreover, the offline retailer always obtains the highest demand with third-party LS, but the online retailer obtains the lowest one. Most importantly, when the online retailer introduces third-party LS, it might result in a “win–win” situation for both retailers. In addition, we extend the basic model to the case with a more powerful online retailer.

Time pressure is one of the most commonly promotion methods in live streaming e-commerce (LSE), but can it promote consumers’ impulse buying? There is no answer, and existing research conclusions in traditional commerce context are inconsistent. Is this impact the same for different types of product and consumers with different characteristics? Existing research cannot give a good answer either. Therefore, based on the Construal Level Theory, adopting the situational questionnaire method, this study explored the impact of time pressure on impulse buying in LSE and the moderating effect of product type (search product and experience product) and consumer regulatory focus (promotion focus and prevention focus). The results show that: (1) Time pressure will promote consumers' impulsive buying. (2) For search product, the impact of time pressure will be enhanced, but the impact will be weakened for experience product. (3) For promotion-focus consumers, the impact of time pressure will be enhanced; but for prevention-focus consumers, the impact will be weakened. These empirically tested the impact of time pressure on consumers’ impulse buying in LSE, and clarified the boundary conditions of this impact. Meanwhile, these can explain the inconsistency of existing research conclusions to a certain extent, which enriches researches on LSE and gives implications for LSE merchants to utilize time pressure better.

The present empirical study is the first research to examine how the price tolerance of online buyers correlates with price comparison website (PCW) usage and customer relationship status (CRS). Longitudinal sales data of power tools and household appliances in 8,097 transactions from a German online shop and scraped PCW price data over a 6-months period in 2021 are used for the analysis. Consumer demand falls on average by around 80% per less favorable PCW rank. In addition, PCW (new) customers show significantly less price tolerance than organic (existing) customers. A small but significant interaction effect induces that the correlation of CRS and price tolerance is stronger for organic than for PCW customers.

Due to the lack of medical examinations, in online health platforms (called online channels), a portion of users are unable to be diagnosed. Recently, many mobile health providers have started investing in offline clinics or hospitals (called offline channels) to offer further health services to these customers (i.e., the online–offline model). Providers need to determine the optimal investment and pricing strategies of online and offline channels to maximize profits. In this paper, we first analyze the optimal strategies of the provider in a monopoly case, and find that the properties of optimal online and offline decisions tend to be opposite due to the competitive nature of the two channels. Furthermore, we compare this with the case where the provider invests only in the online channel (i.e., the online-only model) in terms of profitability and show that if the value of the online health (or the offline health) is not high (high enough), then the provider should choose the online–offline model, otherwise she should adopt the online-only model. Finally, we investigate a case of an m-health platform competing with local clinics and find certain interesting insights. In particular, unlike the monopoly case, in the competition case, the platform should operate the offline channel when the sensitivity of patients to the online service quality is at a moderate level, and not otherwise.

This study aims to investigate the effect of constraints; regulatory, technological, political, economic, and cultural, on the adoption of FinTech in banks through techniques of FinTech; artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, and blockchain in Yemen. The information for this study was collected through a questionnaire that included 332 respondents and was analyzed at the managerial level for 361 bank branches. Structural equation modeling through PLS, a disjoint two-stage approach, was used to approve the model's constructs. The study results reveal a significant negative effect of the constraints on adopting FinTech in banks. Technological, economic, and political constraints negatively affect banks' adoption of digital FinTech techniques. But regulatory and cultural constraints have an insignificant effect. This study may be important for specialists and those interested in FinTech development and valuable for decision-makers to address obstacles and keep pace with financial technology developments in Yemen.

Gift exchange is a common practice in people’s lives, with a significant proportion of e-commerce sales in the world attributed to gift purchases. However, gift-giving can be challenging for many individuals, as gift-givers often struggle to accurately predict the recipient’s reactions. To address this issue, personalized recommendation systems can be utilized to facilitate gift selection. This paper reviews psychological, marketing, and anthropological research related to gift exchange and proposes a framework for gift recommendation systems based on the introduced metrics. Subsequently, the paper surveys existing gift recommendation systems literature and evaluates their adherence to the proposed framework. The contributions of this paper are two-fold: (1) Giving a clear understanding of gift exchange practices and proposing a framework for gift recommendation systems, and (2) Reviewing gift recommendation systems literature and examining their adherence to the provided framework.

Online reviews are essential to consumers' decision-making when purchasing products on e-commerce platforms. Most of the existing research conducts sentiment analysis on online reviews, yet the disclosure characteristics of these reviews have not received sufficient attention. Therefore, this paper evaluated the information characteristics of online reviews using review length, readability, redundancy, and specificity indicators. By collecting 18,131 online clothing reviews, we applied Latent Dirichlet allocation to divide the review texts into nine topics. We also investigate the relationship between review text characteristics and review sentiment and verify the robustness of the results using different regression models. We conclude that a review with more words, higher redundancy, lower fog index, and lower specificity tends to express a more positive emotion of the review. Our research will help e-commerce platforms construct general review writing guidelines to improve consumer satisfaction.

Unlike general e-commerce, live streaming commerce innovatively allows live streamers to use instant social functions to communicate with viewers and present products in a more vivid way. However, little research has been done to understand the effects of multiple information cues in live streaming commerce. Drawing on the stimulus–organism–response (S–O–R) theory, we develop a two-phase research framework to examine how the combination of endogenous and exogenous cues can influence viewers’ information processing and arouse purchase intention when watching e-commerce live streaming. We also propose that product involvement may moderate the effects of information cues. To investigate the above effects, we conduct a laboratory experiment using self-report and functional near-infrared spectroscopy. In summary, the experimental results show that the richer the cues provided by the live streaming, the better the effect on viewers’ product knowledge accessibility for low-involvement products. However, complex information cues have a negative effect on the viewers’ cognitive processing of high-involvement products, which may distract viewers’ attention from the products and reduce consumers’ product knowledge accessibility. In addition, the introduction of the live streamer, the real-time comments, and the detailed product list aroused the viewers' positive emotions among the viewers and thus stimulated their purchase intention. These findings can help platforms, businesses, and live streamers improve their marketing strategies.