Editor’s Introduction 29(3)
Vladimir Zwass
International Journal of Electronic Commerce,
Volume 29, Number 3, 2025, pp. 333-334.
The Internet/Web has brought us mass connectivity. The aggregate has also brought the power to a single individual to influence the course of affairs, to monetize intelligence, cleverness, persistence, and initiative, and to skew a marketplace. The influencer phenomenon exploits these polarities. Naturally, this opportunity has not escaped the attention of marketers—and thus garners the attention of marketing research.
The first paper of this issue of the International Journal of Economic Commerce presents an investigation of sponsored influencer videos, which combine the organic content with the promotional one. Li Chen, Yiwen Chen, Yang Pan, and Andrew N. Smith analyze such sponsored video as a form of product placement, a well-established promotional technique. The authors have developed an engagement framework that combines the consideration of the videos’ structure (how to place the promotion within the video) with the promotional content (what to place). The interrelationship of the two aspects is obvious, but what is it? The researchers test their framework and arrive at nuanced conceptualization and conclusions that will help both in the deployment of influencer marketing and in the further research into online influencing.
A closely related phenomenon is studied by Hangsheng Yang, Chuan Luo, and Xin (Robert) Luo. In live-streaming e-commerce (LSE), the viewers (potential buyers) engage—to a greater or lesser extent—with the anchors, the masters of ceremonies in the “LSE rooms.” Indeed, some of the anchors evoke fandom—and here you have another face of influencer. It is the burden of this paper to establish empirically, which features of the anchor convert the viewers into fans—and which distract from such a conversion. Multimodal features, i.e., verbal, vocal, and visual, are considered with the use of the heuristic-systematic model. The obvious pragmatic help in anchor selection is accompanied by the contribution to a broadly understood influence theory. The future of virtual anchors with optimal features is at the virtual door.
Youngsoo Kim and Robert J. Kauffman take us to a different level of the e-commerce (EC) stack. The telecommunication services that underpin EC delivered via mobile telephony offer many options in segmented pricing and service bundling. The authors study the cross-effects between the fixed broadband and mobile broadband services using the rich array of data, extending in intervals over a decade and a half. Aside from the inherent conclusions regarding telecommunications pricing, the work highlights the close relationship between this infrastructure and entertainment services offered on it.
Selling platforms have access to the customer-demand information. Manufacturers do not. Should the platforms share this information with manufacturers? The obvious answer is: it depends. But how? Kai Liu and Haiyan Wang respond to this question with formal modeling. They trichotomize platforms into pure resale platforms, commission platforms, and hybrids combining both sale modes and the findings surface differentially the incentives to share. As may be expected, the most interesting results are obtained for the hybrid platforms. The authors present also the contractual mechanisms to regularize information sharing between the EC platforms and manufacturers.
Ridesharing platforms, such as Lyft and Uber, allow (well, encourage) the passengers to tip the drivers. Soo Jeong Hong, Nelson Granados, Kwangjin Lee, and Johannes M. Bauer empirically study the tipping behavior under the lens of the racial makeup of the passenger-driver duo, with a large data array at the authors’ disposal. It is comforting to see that the researchers do not find a systematic bias in tipping in the aggregate. The more granular findings surface significant differences in rewards, some of them unexpected. The conclusions are of value not only for the design of ridesharing payments, but also for sociological understanding of our society.