Strategy,Resource Orchestration,and Capability: A Cross-case Comparison Of E-Commerce Platforms

The popularity of Internet stimulated e-commerce to flourish.Recently,both developed and developing countries put forward the Internet strategy to promote the integration of Internet and traditional industries,such as Germany’s “4.0” industry,China’s “Internet +” and “industry 2025”,etc.,which could further promote the development of e-commerce.Therefore,many e-commerce platforms emerged and many traditional companies also started to involve Internet business,which breed two types of e-commerce platforms – transformative platform and natural born platform.Although both of them can succeed,the failure rate of e-commerce has been extremely high.Thus,this paper aims to explore how e-commerce platforms could succeed.The literature review on has fully proved that resources’ re important for e-commerce platforms,however,the latest research puts forward resource orchestration to describe that the dynamic utility of resources is more important to obtain competitive advantages,instead of the resources per se.Therefore,this paper adopted resource orchestration perspective to investigate how e-commerce could succeed.As case study is benefit for answering the “how” question and transformative and natural born platform have different resource bases naturally,this paper selected a successful transformative platform – EasyLife,and a successful nature born platform – E-Vegetable to investigate how the two types of platforms orchestrated their resources to become successful through conducting a cross-case study.The research findings indicate that: both of the two types of platforms require the same capabilities to succeed,i.e.capability for response to the market,agility response,and adjustment;the capabilities are generated through resource orchestration under the guidance of strategies;given different resource bases,transformative and natural born platforms must select different strategies.Therefore,this research not only contributes to the resource orchestration perspective through comparing the different resource orchestration of the two platforms,but also generates empirical insights e-commerce practitioners through illustrating the different development paths of the two platforms.