Understanding the Competitive Dynamics in Emarketplace: An Action Sequence Analysis Approach

Prior e-commerce studies have advanced our understanding of how e-marketplace sellers’ both single usage and configurations of platform-based functions (PBFs) as competitive actions to enhance their sales performance. However, with the mature of the e-marketplaces, it has been an essential capability for sellers to make sense of their rivals’ actions holistically and agilely respond to them so as to enhance their sales performance. Thus, overlooking the evolution of the usage sequence of these functions by sellers over time has limited our understanding of the competitive dynamics in emarketplace. To unfold the patterns of competitive attacks of e-marketplace sellers over time, we developed a research model that incorporates the four properties presented in e-marketplace sellers’ usage sequence of PBFs over time (i.e., simplicity, predictability, grouping and motif) and sales performance by drawing on competitive dynamic literature. To test the research model, we have collected a longitudinal dataset of 1000 Taobao sellers over ten months.