Review of studies on digital transaction platforms in marketing journals

Abstract

Digital transaction platforms now intermediate a large number of transactions between end-customers and independent sellers and service providers in many parts of the economy. In retail, for example, Amazon.com now intermediates transactions between end-customers and hundreds of thousands of independent sellers worldwide, while Etsy.com connects artists, crafters, and collectors with buyers of a large range of niche and rare products. The growing popularity of digital transaction platforms, therefore, has significant implications for retail, marketing and distribution scholars as the existing interaction patterns in the value-chain are increasingly replaced by new digital intermediaries. The purpose of this review is, therefore, to examine, through an extensive and rigorous review of research on digital transaction platforms in marketing journals, what we know and what opportunities lie ahead to expand the theoretical and empirical understanding of digital transaction platforms. The review shows that despite increasing multi-disciplinary and managerial interest towards digital transaction platforms, they remain largely unexplored in marketing journals, and the existing research and theorizing attempts remain fragmented. Therefore, there are many opportunities for marketing, retail and distribution scholars to, for example, collaborate with industry and practitioners in order to gain new perspectives and access to novel data sources, and for example, meet the emerging funding requirements of many universities and governmental funding agencies for multi-disciplinary research on digital markets and digital business models.

From the store to omnichannel retail: looking back over three decades of research

“…Hallikainen, Alamäki, and Laukkanen 2019). This puts high pressure on researchers to understand and stay on top of digital developments in retailing (Hänninen 2020). For example, AI and DLTB technology will likely lead to more secure and trackable transactions, while also enabling the traceability of products at unprecedented levels which will provide both new earnings-and business models, as well as the opportunity for new entrants to enter the sector (Attaran and Gunasekaran 2019).…”

Customer management in Internet-based platform firms: review and future research directions

“…Although some review studies have been conducted in other management fields (e.g. Sriram et al, 2015;McIntyre and Srinivasa, 2017;H€ anninen, 2020), to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first marketing review focused on customer management issues in platform firms.…”

From customer to actor value propositions: an analysis of digital transaction platforms

“…Despite recent research on internet platforms and online retail, digital transaction platforms are still in an early phase of scholarly exploration (Hänninen 2020). Given the novelty of the research phenomenon of digital platforms (Muzellec, Ronteau, and Lambkin 2015), this study follows an explorative, qualitative research strategy, in which extensive review of suitable case examples offer the means to capture an evolving phenomenon.…”

“…However, despite outstanding academic and practitioner interest in digital transaction platforms, research on these topics remains limited and fragmented in marketing and retail journals (Hänninen 2020;Perren and Kozinets 2018;Sriram et al 2015). It is generally agreed that digital transaction platforms present both tremendous opportunities and challenges for marketers and businesses (Leeflang et al 2014).…”

“…Analyzing the value proposition in this context is essential, since it is a key element of any business model (Johnson, Christensen, and Kagermann 2008). While there is an emerging stream of research addressing important platformrelated topics, such as business model attributes (Täuscher and Laudien 2018) and platform strategies (Zhu and Furr 2016), there have been only a few attempts to address and clarify the role of CVPs in the context of the platform economy (Muzellec, Ronteau, and Lambkin 2015), and particularly with regard to digital transaction platforms and in a retail and consumer services setting (Hänninen 2020).…”