Imbalance of development and resources allocation can emerge during the rapid expansion of social commerce enterprises, which significantly reduces their competitiveness and sustainability. In this paper, we put forward the concept of social commerce ecosystem and propose a model composed of macro-niche and micro-niche to empirically analyze the performance of different social commerce enterprises in China. The results show that: (1) The social sharing e-commerce sub-industry is a monopoly market while the social retail e-commerce sub-industry tends to be a perfectly competitive market; (2) Compared with using only macro-niche or micro-niche, our model shows a more comprehensive insight of enterprise competitiveness, which provides a better niche evaluation for other industries.
This paper aims to explore the optimal marketing channel of e-commerce enterprises with various consumer base size and product added-value in social commerce. By characterizing the consumer utility, we construct decision-making models of e-commerce enterprises under the traditional e-commerce platform (TECP) and two kinds of social commerce marketing channels involving “e-commerce platform + social” (ECPS) and “social media + business” (SMB). Then, we obtain the optimal strategy of e-commerce enterprises for each channel by using the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions, and verify the effectiveness of the corollaries by numerical simulation. Results find that social commerce marketing channels (ECPS and SMB) are not necessarily better than TECP. For e-commerce enterprises with low consumer base size and low product added-value, the TECP channel offers the largest profit. Besides, SMB is the preferred marketing channel for most e-commerce enterprises.
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