دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی یک چارچوب برای شناسایی عوامل موثر بر عملکرد بازار B2B شخص ثالث: دیدگاه فروشنده - اشپرینگر 2017

Abstract

This study conducted exploratory research to determine factors affecting the performance of third-party B2B emarketplaces from a seller’s perspective. Building on the relevant literature, ten factors were proposed and mapped into the domain-specific model for e-marketplaces. The performance of e-marketplaces was measured in terms of customer loyalty and trading volume. The proposed model was tested on data from 200 selling companies in Thailand participating in various third-party B2B e-marketplaces. The exploratory factor analysis generated seven factors. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was employed to test the research model. There were three major findings. First, the reputation of e-marketplace and trust in market makers, as well as transaction cost reduction and website usability, had significant effects on customer loyalty. Second, website reliability had a positive impact on trading volume. Finally, the relative advantage and number of buyers had significant effects on both customer loyalty and trading volume. These findings reveal factors previously unreported in the literature on e-marketplaces, and they can be used by practitioners to improve performance.

Discussion and conclusions

The empirical results indicated four key findings. First, the relative advantage and number of buyers revealed significant effects on the performance of third-party B2B emarketplaces, in terms of both customer loyalty and trading volume. These findings suggested that the basic requirement for inducing selling firms to become loyal customers of B2B e-marketplaces is to give the sellers wider market reach by having a large number of buyers to trade through the emarketplace and maximize the relative advantages that sellers gain from participation. Second, this study found that the use of third-party B2B e-marketplaces reduced transaction costs for sellers, especially search costs, and transaction cost reduction and website usability had significant effects on customer loyalty. These findings indicated a Bfacilitating transactions^ orientation in the function of e-marketplaces. Moreover, the findings complemented past research findings by Liang and Huang (1998) that confirmed the significant role that transaction costs play in e-commerce preference. However, this finding contradicted findings by Casaló et al. (2008), who found that website usability did not directly affect customer loyalty but rather had an indirect effect through consumer satisfaction in B2C context. This was probably because sellers’ interactions with B2B e-marketplace websites are more complicated than buyers’ interaction with B2C websites. Therefore, website usability is important to the seller experience in third-party B2B e-marketplaces. Third, the reputation of e-marketplace and trust in market makers had a significant impact on customer loyalty. This was consistent with the findings of Casaló et al. (2008) that confirmed the positive and significant effect of reputation on online loyalty in the context of B2C. Furthermore, the influence of trust in market makers on customer loyalty agreed with the study by Hong and Cho (2011), which targeted trust in B2C e-marketplaces. Fourth, website reliability had a positive impact on trading volume. These results suggest that building a usable and reliable website is important to the performance of third-party B2B e-marketplaces.