B2C eCommerce Strategy and Market Structure: The Survey Based Approach

This paper follows two objectives: (i) It demonstrates the merits of the survey based approach to B2C eCommerce characteristics and company strategy, and (ii) it presents empirical evidence of the crucial importance of size and marketing investment in B2C eCommerce markets. It presents econometric estimates of the effects of company characteristics and company strategies on the performance of Viennese B2C eCommerce companies in 2001. We provide econometric analysis of three dependent variables in turn: (i) number of B2C eCommerce customers in 2000, (ii) number of B2C eCommerce employees in January 2001 and (iii) revenue growth rate in 2001. The models do explain the data quite well: Size as well as endogenous sunk costs emerge as the main success factors. Furthermore, the results of nonparametric tests are presented. They mostly confirm the econometric evidence. We also show that the quantitative results are consistent with the qualitative results of the surveys. Finally, we argue that the survey based approach to B2C eCommerce is a method that provides reliable and consistent data, and that it complements the approach based on prices and consumer behavior commonly applied.B2C eCommerce, empirical evidence, success factors, endogenous sunk costs, market structure

B2C eCommerce Strategy and Market Structure: The Survey Based Approach

This paper follows two objectives: (i) It demonstrates the merits of the survey based approach to B2C eCommerce characteristics and company strategy, and (ii) it presents empirical evidence of the crucial importance of size and marketing investment in B2C eCommerce markets. It presents econometric estimates of the effects of company characteristics and company strategies on the performance of Viennese B2C eCommerce companies in 2001. We provide econometric analysis of three dependent variables in turn: (i) number of B2C eCommerce customers in 2000, (ii) number of B2C eCommerce employees in January 2001 and (iii) revenue growth rate in 2001. The models do explain the data quite well: Size as well as endogenous sunk costs emerge as the main success factors. Furthermore, the results of nonparametric tests are presented. They mostly confirm the econometric evidence. We also show that the quantitative results are consistent with the qualitative results of the surveys. Finally, we argue that the survey based approach to B2C eCommerce is a method that provides reliable and consistent data, and that it complements the approach based on prices and consumer behavior commonly applied.B2C eCommerce, empirical evidence, success factors, endogenous sunk costs

Functional Data Analysis in Electronic Commerce Research

This paper describes opportunities and challenges of using functional data analysis (FDA) for the exploration and analysis of data originating from electronic commerce (eCommerce). We discuss the special data structures that arise in the online environment and why FDA is a natural approach for representing and analyzing such data. The paper reviews several FDA methods and motivates their usefulness in eCommerce research by providing a glimpse into new domain insights that they allow. We argue that the wedding of eCommerce with FDA leads to innovations both in statistical methodology, due to the challenges and complications that arise in eCommerce data, and in online research, by being able to ask (and subsequently answer) new research questions that classical statistical methods are not able to address, and also by expanding on research questions beyond the ones traditionally asked in the offline environment. We describe several applications originating from online transactions which are new to the statistics literature, and point out statistical challenges accompanied by some solutions. We also discuss some promising future directions for joint research efforts between researchers in eCommerce and statistics.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000132 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A predictive model for e-commerce consumer expenditure in EC countries

Describing and predicting consumer expenditure on a country or cross-national level has a long tradition in theoretical and applied economics and econometrics. This paper is a first attempt in describing aggregate eCommerce consumer expenditure among European Commission (EC) countries. After brief introduction of possible theoretical models which explain the variation in eCommerce consumer expenditure among observed countries, a list of important predictors has been discussed. The results generated by regression analysis show that non-traditional factors such as online time (measured by “Average online time per citizen per month”) and consumer lack of confidence, i.e. mistrust (measured by “Effects of security concerns on eCommerce”) are more reliable predictors of aggregate eCommerce consumer expenditure in EC countries than the traditional factors such as disposable income and price of the products.E-Commerce; Consumer Expenditure; European Commission

Using webcrawling of publicly available websites to assess E-commerce relationships

We investigate e-commerce success factors concerning their impact on the success of commerce transactions between businesses companies. In scientific literature, many e-commerce success factors are introduced. Most of them are focused on companies' website quality. They are evaluated concerning companies' success in the business-to- consumer (B2C) environment where consumers choose their preferred e-commerce websites based on these success factors e.g. website content quality, website interaction, and website customization. In contrast to previous work, this research focuses on the usage of existing e-commerce success factors for predicting successfulness of business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce. The introduced methodology is based on the identification of semantic textual patterns representing success factors from the websites of B2B companies. The successfulness of the identified success factors in B2B ecommerce is evaluated by regression modeling. As a result, it is shown that some B2C e-commerce success factors also enable the predicting of B2B e-commerce success while others do not. This contributes to the existing literature concerning ecommerce success factors. Further, these findings are valuable for B2B e-commerce websites creation

Personalized Ranking in eCommerce Search

We address the problem of personalization in the context of eCommerce search. Specifically, we develop personalization ranking features that use in-session context to augment a generic ranker optimized for conversion and relevance. We use a combination of latent features learned from item co-clicks in historic sessions and content-based features that use item title and price. Personalization in search has been discussed extensively in the existing literature. The novelty of our work is combining and comparing content-based and content-agnostic features and showing that they complement each other to result in a significant improvement of the ranker. Moreover, our technique does not require an explicit re-ranking step, does not rely on learning user profiles from long term search behavior, and does not involve complex modeling of query-item-user features. Our approach captures item co-click propensity using lightweight item embeddings. We experimentally show that our technique significantly outperforms a generic ranker in terms of Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR). We also provide anecdotal evidence for the semantic similarity captured by the item embeddings on the eBay search engine.Comment: Under Revie

Ecommerce in Pakistan: Challenges & Opportunities

Ecommerce has been promoted across the globe as one of the key enablers for youth entrepreneurship and employment. Despite a favorable internet and mobile demographics and increasing ecommerce adoption, Pakistan’s ecommerce market size remains tiny compared to other similar countries. As part of a larger study aiming to explore the challenges and opportunities in Pakistani ecommerce, we conducted a qualitative study with 10 e-entrepreneurs to explore the factors hindering ecommerce growth in Pakistan. We identify that along with the challenges related to customer, payments and logistics; the absence of institutions and trade bodies to support and promote ecommerce, are hindering explosive ecommerce growth in Pakistan. We suggest that development of a rational ecommerce policy based on field data and ground realities; and effective implementation of such policy has a pivotal role in providing the enabling environment for ecommerce growth. Therefore, we propose an in depth inquiry into the nature and size of ecommerce market in Pakistan, based on which ecommerce policy guidelines will be developed for ecommerce growth in Pakistan. Should an enabling environment be provided for ecommerce growth in Pakistan, a huge opportunity for youth and female entrepreneurship and employment can be created