Successful retailer strategies in price comparison platforms

Abstract

The choice of an appropriate e-commerce strategy for the listing in price comparison platforms (eBay, Amazon, and price search engines) is crucial for the survival of online stores in B2C e-commerce business. We use a comprehensive dataset from the Austrian price search engine geizhals.at to identify successful e-commerce strategies with regard to these listing decisions. An e-commerce strategy is a set of choices including the listing decision, availability decision, and decisions on a price path and shipping cost. We apply cluster analysis to identify the different strategies that have been used by online retailers. Using various success measures such as revenue, clicks, market share, and the survival of firms, as dependent variables in our regression analyses, we present causal evidence on the effectiveness of different e-commerce strategies.