Research On Business Model Of Large-Scale Retailers In E-Commerce Context

Since the year of2008that e-commerce businesses explored, traditional large-scale retailers focus on online business initially. The number of Top100retailers increases from2in2008to73in2012. Besides the traditional e-business, such as cloths, home appliances and digital products, there are more and more products in on-line business including medicine, health products and real estates. However, Tianmao and Jingdong, as the typical e-commerce, take70percentage of market share of on-line B2C business. Traditional retailers only take9percentage of make share in2012. Therefore, how traditional and large-scale retailers can create value is becoming an urging issue. Moreover, business model is a research field that focuses on e-commerce enterprises’ value creation. With the development of e-commerce in traditional industry, building a successful business model becomes the necessary way of solving the problem of value creation in e-business context. However, retailing business model researches are few. It is not clear how retailing business model realizes value creation for enterprises. Therefore, this paper focused on business model of traditional and large-scale retailers and explored retailing business model from core logic, elements and design theme.First, this paper analyzed business model literatures and then built the framework of business model as the research model by content analysis method. Then based on the framework, this paper put Suning Ltd., Shanghai No.1Food Ltd. and Heilan Home Ltd. as the sample of multi-case study. By analyzing the content and relationship of elements of business model and design theme of business model, this paper compared and contrasted the model of these three retailers. Finally, this paper concluded as following:(1) the construct of business model is necessary and important in theory.(2) in the context of e-business, traditional retailing business model can be divided into three models, such as integrating on-line and off-line business model, focusing on off-line business model and focusing on on-line business model.(3) Resource and capability, as the element of business model, can be integrated.(4) The value creation process of retailing business model initiate from value proposition, then make resource&capability and value network corporate with each other. The three elements of business model effect profit model that is the mechanism of value capturing. Finally, retailers complete the process of value creation.(5) Value network cover the gap of resource&capability in some degree.(6) The design themes of retailing business model are customer effective, customer efficient, customer experience, operation effective and operation efficient.This paper made the three main contributions to business model theory.(1) By the content analysis method, this paper built the concept framework of business model, which is helpful to get the common understanding on business model and makes the contribution to solve the problem of business model construct in some degree.(2) This paper applied the framework of business model to the e-business context and retailing industry. By fixing the framework under the specific context, this paper got the retailing business model framework, which covers the gap of retailing business model research, and rich the business model theory.(3) The findings of this paper explore the value creation theory on the level of organization. Finally, research limitation and future research were discussed.