Dynamic Development Of Business Models For E-business Enterprises

Since the late90s of the21st century, the E-commerce industry in China has developed rapidly. E-commerce is a low profitable industry to many domestic EC companies due to intensive competition, thus companies has to engage in price wars to capature customer resources. But with the pressure of profitability and better understanding of EC market, more and more EC companies start to place emphasis on superior service, such as extending product categories to offer one-stop shopping experience, or launching customization and personalization and etc. We noticed that EC companies in China has switched their value proposition from provding efficiency to a more complicated fashion.Value Proposition, the core of the concept of business model, tells what kind of value a company tries to convey to their customers through their offerings. Here we provide an evolutionary perspective of value proposition and other related constructs of interest. We first review literature on business model, value proposition and value network, from which we gain a deepful insight into the notion and structure of business model. We take the view of Amit and Zott, who identified four major value drivers—Efficiency, Complementarities, Lock-in and Novelty. We conducted a longitudinal study between2003and2012by analyzing838news on the industry of E-commerce in China published on Iresearch. This exploratory study shows an explicit and reasonable changing trend of value proposition within the study period and also presents the underlying logic of the co-evolutionary change between the constructs composing business model.