Research On The Investment Decision Of Competitive Advantage In C2C E - Commerce Platform

With the rapid development of Chinese e-business, e-tailers expand rapidly to the size of more than83million in2011, in which small and medium-sized e-tailers accounted for96.5%, however contribute less than20%of turnover, small and medium-sizede-tailers are facing fierce competition. How to use limited resources to promote sales is a common concern facing in many small and medium-sized e-tailers. In this context, identify the key resource and guide small and medium-sized e-tailers to make proper decision is a realistic problem that worth to study.Previous research on online sales pointed out that store design, customer trust, promotions, word of mouth is the important factors that influence sales, but these studies have some limitations. First, most of them ignored the process of customer coming to the store and assume customers have already arrived at the store. Second, it is difficult to distinguish accurately in a minority of the influence factors of key resources. Third, these studies have not a complete theoretical framework. Based on this, this article divide customer buying process into stages of traffic and sales, and try to find out the influence factors that influence traffic and sales stage respectively through literatures research and Taobao practice, and has established a theory model that can include all the whole process of how to acquire traffic flow and how to acquire more sales.In this article, we collecting second-hand data in Taobao, and using empirical research methods to verify the theory model put forward, has identified the key factors that influencing the traffic stage and sales stage. Results show that at the traffic stage, entrance location and existing sales is the key resource factors, price and warrant number have no significant impacts. At sales stage, existing sales, reputation, warrant number and negative feedback and price are all key factors. This model considers all the resources in traffic stage and sales stage, and formed a complete theoretical framework, therefore, is a powerful complement to previous literature. However, this model also has certain limitations, without considering the time effect, lag effect of resource elements, and also the feedback of sales on traffic. According to the shortcomings of the model, this article select entry resources as an example and has carried on the further exploration research by using PVAR model to study interactive relationships among advertising, search sorting, traffic and sales. However the GMM estimation shows that, most of interactions between variables are not significant.This study complements the previous literature, and has certain reference value for advertising, marketing and other inter-disciplinary, and can also provide decision making support for the majority of small and medium-sized e-tailers in practice, therefore this study is valuable both in theory and practice.