Physical intermediary firms, such as logistics firms, are the foundation of marketplace platform ecosystems. This study introduces the case of a delivery crisis caused by the withdrawal of major logistics firms from the Japanese marketplace platform. To address such a problem, this study considers the application of an “ecosystem strategy”. We define an ecosystem strategy in this situation, as “the strategy by which the platform owner cooperates with logistics firms to standardize logistics services and provides a platform system to improve cooperation among them”. We constructed an agent-based simulation system customized by a dataset of Japanese platform-based markets to test the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. The results indicate that the introduction of the ecosystem strategy postponed the start of the collapse. It also increased the number of platform users by roughly 1.10 times and increased the total profits of logistics firms about 1.22 times. Additionally, it removed the trade-off relationship between platform users and the profits of logistics firms and allowed the maximization of both. This study contributed to the research stream of platform ecosystems by defining an ecosystem strategy, including physical intermediary firms, and verifying the effectiveness of the strategy for ecosystem evolution and sustainability.

This study analyzed the changes in consumers' use dynamics of general e-commerce (EC) platforms (e.g., Amazon.com) during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We initially supposed that the significance of consumer benefits, including pricing, product variety, and delivery services, on the platforms would decrease and the value of using an EC platform itself would increase due to the pandemic, based on which we conducted a comparative analysis of questionnaire data from 2,119 Japanese consumers who use general EC platforms. The data were obtained in November 2018 and January 2021. Our analysis has two parts, the first designed as a conjoint analysis to statistically analyze the changes in consumers' sense of values for pricing, variety of goods, stability and quality of delivery services, and basic benefits of using EC platforms; and the second part designed to statistically analyze the changes in comprehensive items when using EC platforms. We categorized the dataset into men and women and further clustered them based on the patterns of consumers' sense of factors when using EC platform. The analysis results were inconsistent with our initial supposition, in that a nonnegligible proportion of consumer clusters showed an increase in the significance of factors, including pricing, product variety, and delivery service, and a decrease in the basic benefits of using EC platforms. Regarding the results of the analysis of comprehensive items, the only commonly observed change for most clusters of both men and women was an increase in the use of package drop. The results indicate that changes in consumers' sense of using EC platforms due to the pandemic were not as simple as supposed because the pandemic caused various changes in the need mechanism of consumers of EC platforms.

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