Identification and classification of the business model elements influencing on trading strategy in startup business with a meta-synthesis approach

Nowadays, new opportunities for business development have been created on the internet, which have shaped different business concepts. In addition, the number of e-businesses has increased recently but in many cases, they have faced great challenges for development and survival. These challenges are mainly reduced by having a proper plan for the business model (BM). Despite the extensive studies which have done in the literature, there is not a complete consensus on the elements of the BM. Furthermore, there are few studies on e-business. Hence, in this paper, with the meta-synthesis method, previous researches were investigated within 1998-2018 and, the BM elements were extracted and the importance coefficient of extraction codes was determined by Shannon entropy. In this process, from the total number of articles found, 81 articles were reviewed and 27 codes were extracted and classified into 8 concepts and 4 categories.  Accordingly, the three elements including the value propositions, the revenue streams model and the customer have the most repeatability and the importance coefficient in previous studies. Therefore, paying attention to these elements is important to improve e-business strategies. For this reason, the identified components were classified into two levels including goals and strategies, and implementation.