Legitimacy building and e-commerce platform development in China: The experience of Alibaba

Abstract

A B S T R A C TAlthough existing studies have connected the emergence and development of e-commerce with infrastructure, culture, and regulations, we approach technological and platform acceptance from the perspective of legitimacy building. In our study, legitimacy is categorized into market, relational, and social legitimacy, and the link between each type of legitimacy and acceptance is explored. We select the case of Alibaba and argue that Alibaba was especially competent in building legitimacy. Alibaba's continuous efforts to build legitimacy facilitated platform evolution despite its exposed weakness in intellectual property rights. These efforts rendered Alibaba as a de facto standard e-business model. This research suggests that any firm that wants market acceptance for its platform or e-commerce technology should focus more on building legitimacy among stakeholders than on anything else.

Assessing the application of big data technology in platform business model: A hierarchical framework

“…Platform enterprises adopt the services provided by new partners with an open attitude and create new value [60]. However, data resources are now in "rampant expansion", so when platform enterprises are building the value network, legitimacy construction is necessary for almost every important decision [11]. Enterprises should strengthen their own data security construction and establish multidimensional protection measures and trustworthy protection mechanisms to ensure the confidentiality of user resources in the process of big data platform cooperation and to prevent data leakage [61].…”

“…C1 market segmentation 1,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13 From the ISM model structure of the influence factor, we can see that market segmentation (C1), value content(C2) and community building(C4) are the root causes of the impact of big data on the platform business model. Thus, the way in which to effectively control the tracking and control of big data becomes a key focus.…”

“…It is an important platform for the orderly coordination and integration of information flow, goods flow and capital flow. Enterprises and merchants can make full use of the network infrastructure, payment platform, security platform, management platform and other shared resources provided by E-commerce platform to carry out their own business activities more effectively and at a lower cost [11]. Therefore, it is of great significance to explore the influence of big data on the E-commerce platform business model, explore the mutual cooperation and limitations between different modules of the platform business model, and finally reveal the hierarchical path of platform enterprises under big data to compensate for the shortage of such research in the extant literature.…”

Platforms and industrial change

“…In other cases, platforms can provide solutions to problems related to trustworthiness via a variety of mechanisms. For example, Alibaba enables online sales in a low-trust environment such as China by allowing the payment to be held in trust by a vendor until the buyer is satisfied with a purchase (Kwak, Zhang, and Jiang 2019), and Yelp, Booking.com, and Airbnb use a combination of ratings systems for user and provider vetting.…”

E-Commerce Based on the Law of Buying and Selling in Islam

“…E-Commerce refers to the use of information and communication technology to network activities and economic processes, to reduce information related to transaction costs to obtain strategic benefits (Zainul et al, 2004). Based on the research conducted (Kwak, Zhang, & Yu, 2018) as a whole Alibaba has become a business leader who has created "standards" in doing business and industrial development in the Chinese E-Commerce Industry. This shows that the development of E-Commerce in other countries is also very rapid.…”