Establishing successful e-commerce ecosystems: Evaluating strategies for reaching a critical mass of participants

Although e-commerce in general and platform business models report steadily increasing revenues, establishing ecosystems is not a guaranteed success per se. Potential owners must carefully plan the ignition of ecosystem to reach critical mass customers. This crucial for benefit from direct indirect network effects. However, research so far has provided clear guidance strategies on how successfully establish e-commerce. Therefore, we evaluated demonstrated generic Our evaluation thereby based upon an established mathematical model two-sided markets considering utility gains effects costs. The heterogeneity individual market sides reflected form sigmoidal distribution functions. Applying this model, show that subsidies, seeding, marquee, single side, micro market, piggybacking, opening up, big bang marketing are potential reaching participants ecosystems. We provide practitioners successful contribute body knowledge by bridging