Synergetic Mechanisms and Performance Evaluation of Cloud-Enabled Cross-Border E-Commerce Ecosystems: A System Dynamics and Fuzzy Evaluation Approach

Abstract

Cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) has become a defining force in the digital economy, yet its reliance on cloud services introduces systemic vulnerabilities that remain underexplored. This study reconceptualizes CBEC as a cloud-orchestrated adaptive system shaped by technological and institutional dynamics, integrating explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and system dynamics (SD) to link micro-level adoption signals with macro-level resilience. Using 5,000 multi-source transaction records from leading Chinese platforms (Dec 2023–Mar 2025), the analysis shows that cloud-native flows—technology throughput, information quality, logistics reliability, and payment safety—jointly drive ecosystem coordination. Results indicate autoscaling reduces traffic surges but causes 25–42 second delays, while tail latency spikes beyond 500 concurrent requests; payment safety (r = 0.73) and logistics reliability (r = 0.68) are the strongest predictors of resilience. The study advances digital ecosystem theory, develops a novel SD–XAI framework, and proposes a governance-aligned performance index for balancing efficiency, compliance, and sustainability.