تحلیل تطبیقی درباره ی کیفیت خدمات الکترونیک در بازار آنلاین و بازرگانی اجتماعی A comparative analysis of electronic service quality in the online open market and social commerce

1 Introduction The rise of Internet technology (IT) enables producers and customers to access the e-commerce market through various channels (Lee and Lim 2007; Cho et al. 2011). Because companies have to create new channels using various distribution systems alongside the development of IT, the e-commerce area is ever expanding. In particular, through mobile devices such as smartphones, companies can provide various methods of consumption for consumers. We call this system online-tooffline (O2O) commerce (Zhang et al. 2015). In O2O commerce, competition between companies has intensified. Moreover, changes to competition have occurred in the supply chain network that connects producers and consumers. An analysis of competition in the e-commerce market using Porter’s five-forces model (Porter 1990) shows that opportunities and threats coexist. For instance, new forms of business model such as the online open market and social commerce can intensify the threat of substitute products or services. In this regard, the entry barriers are very low because any products and services can be sold in the e-commerce market. Competition from rivals is also so severe that the division of a competitive area is meaningless. All domestic and foreign companies can become competitors in the e-commerce market. New competitors can easily enter; moreover, it is easy, technically and financially, to start an e-commerce business. At the same time, with the increasing supply of mobile devices and the diversification of users’ ages, the market is gradually expanding and providing new business opportunities. As competition intensifies, however, a company requires a survival strategy and core competencies in order to attract customers (Thomas 2004). A business model is a commonly seen systematic architecture of product, service, and information flows that is the source of value creation for suppliers and customers. E-commerce, which can be defined as online buying and selling transactions, provides a large number of different ways to build such architectures (or business models) based on value-chain deconstruction and reconstruction (Timmers 1999). For instance, Timmers (1999) proposed 11 types of e-commerce business model: e-shops, e-procurement, e-malls, third-party marketplaces, virtual communities, value-chain providers, value-chain integrators, collaboration platforms, and information brokerage/trust providers.