Building Buyers' Long-Term Relationships with the B2B E-Marketplace: the Perspective of Social Capital

The popularity of the Internet has created the growth of B2B e-marketplaces. In spite of the many advantages of B2B e-marketplaces, a majority of buyers are still reluctant to maintain a long-term relationship with B2B e-marketplaces. In order to overcome this problem, we apply social capital theory to propose a research framework for understanding how virtual community play an important role in generation of social capital and formation of sense of virtual community, which in turn drives buyers continuing to use B2B e-marketplaces. A Web-based survey is then conducted in Alibaba’s virtual community to validate our proposed framework. Our research is expected to contribute to the theory by testing social capital theory in the context of the B2B e-marketplace usage. We also expect to contribute to the practice by providing new insights for the B2B e-marketplace providers to understand the value of integrating online community into the B2B e-marketplace.