A Bibliometric Analysis and Systematic Review on E-Marketplaces, Open Innovation, and Sustainability

Abstract

In recent years, the rise of e-commerce has prompted the emergence of electronic marketplaces, or e-marketplaces, which act as intermediaries in the buying and selling process, bringing together several vendors to offer a wide range of products and services to customers, generating modalities such as business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C) or consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-marketplaces. E-marketplaces offer advantages such as access to potential buyers, business and product visibility, the reduction of transaction costs, the comparison of offers and prices among competitors, and the ease of business internationalization. However, the success of e-marketplace business models depends on the sustainability of these platforms, which must involve different stakeholders in order to meet economic, environmental, and social objectives. Therefore, this study presents a bibliometric analysis and systematic review of e-marketplaces, open innovation, and sustainability for the last ten, five, and two years. The analysis includes the number, types, and subject areas of documents published each year, as well as considerations such as the most-cited publications and the leading authors, journals, countries, and institutional affiliations. The analysis also includes a study of the relevant concepts in the publications and their relationships, identifying the predominant topics related to e-marketplaces, open innovation, and sustainability. The results indicate a focus on subject areas such as social sciences, environmental sciences, energy, business, management, and accounting, which is consistent with the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of sustainability. The findings show that e-marketplaces, open innovation, and sustainability are closely related to concepts such as sustainable development, e-commerce, digital marketing, China (the leading country in terms of publications in all periods), logistics, supply chain management, big data, planning, and decision making. Future works should address traffic congestion and environmental impact, new delivery practices in last-mile logistics, and the motives for users’ engagement in e-marketplaces. Likewise, future research can be oriented toward sustainability dimensions and stakeholders’ integration through open innovation and toward the limitations of SMEs in order to access and benefit from digital platforms.

Does High-Tech Industry Agglomeration Promote Its Export Product Upgrading?—Based on the Perspective of Innovation and Openness

“…Public support at the cluster level can improve the cooperation openness of member companies, leading to more and more reliable relations among cluster members, but it also limits the access to more and more valuable information and knowledge resources, which are most relevant to the future environment pursuing sustainability [30]. Therefore, only by continuously implementing the open innovation strategy, through external technology acquisition, some enterprises can obtain advanced technology, and then, through the knowledge spillover effect of industrial agglomeration to improve the advanced technology level and innovation ability of the overall cluster, we can promote the sustainable development of regional economy [31].…”

Social Commerce and Purchase Intention: A Brief Look at the Last Decade by Bibliometrics

“…Accordingly, we can affirm that e-commerce, Web 2.0, and social media, the three pillars of s-commerce, helped the formation and development of s-commerce [3]. S-commerce is the new form of commerce, where strengthened connections between users have become the central focus of firms seeking to have a better relationship with them in order to explore the potential of this phenomenon and foster loyalty [4,5]. Surely, consumer loyalty is the ultimate goal of every firm, but first, they have to create a purchase intention among consumers, which is one of the most important steps of consumer behavior leading to loyalty.…”

Global Research Trends in Consumer Behavior and Sustainability in E-Commerce: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Knowledge Structure

“…The terms used in the Scopus database included variations of consumer behavior, sustainability, and e-commerce (Figure 1). These terms have been used in previous studies [43][44][45]. In the first stage, the search string was applied with no restrictions, returning 20,003 documents.…”

“…In the first stage, the search string was applied with no restrictions, returning 20,003 documents. Following the strategy of previous works [21,44,46], the first selection criteria were to limit the search to the title-abstract-keyword search field, which returned 191 documents. The second selection criterion limited the search to journal articles, returning 109 articles.…”