Performances Of B2C Open Platform Under Network Externality

In the twenty-first century, the rapid development of Internet haschanged people’sproduction and life style,also stimulate thedevelopment of China’s e-commerce market.According to statistics, China’s e-commerce volume of transactions is growing at an annualaverage of35%, and the development of B2C market is particularly obvious. Althoughthere are lots of problems in the development process of B2C e-commerce, the price war,supplier and B2C platform conflict events break out frequently, but the B2C industrymarket structure becomes clear. Since2012, B2C enterprises have put more energy on theopen platform,increased investment on the open platform, such as360buy POP platform,No.1mall ofYihaodian, and Suning launcheda“cloud " strategy. Why B2Centerpriseschoose open strategy spontaneously, whether open platform benefit is reallybetter than the closed platform or not, which is the development direction of B2Centerprises, this dissertation tries to give answers from the theoretical level, through theanalysis of the model.In this dissertation, through the review of the two-sided markets literatures andsummary of B2C industry characteristics, then establish a competition model of B2Cplatform, compare price structure and profit of open platform with closed platform underthe platform competition condition, according to the modeanalysescasesofTmall and360buy, explain why360buy is changing from proprietary closed model to open platform.Specifically, the conclusions of this dissertation are mainly the following three points:(1)Whether it is open or closed, in the symmetric equilibrium condition, cross-group networkexternality is an important factor influence B2C platform to establish the price;it hasreduced registration fee and platform profit that B2C platform charge bilateral users,andimprove bilateral users’ utility.(2)In the symmetric equilibrium condition, registration feeand platform matching technique aretwo main influence factors when platform choosestrategy. When registration fee is large enough, the B2C platform will choose openplatform strategy, with the improvement of platformmatching technique, this tendency ismore obvious.(3) At present B2C platform matching technique is in a low level, but isslowly improving, that’s whyso many B2C platforms areopening their platform.