C2C e-commerce experience: people, product and platform

Raúl Pérez-López (University of Zaragoza), Mika Yrjölä (Tampere University), Larissa Backer (Hanken School of Economics), Hannu Saarijärvi (Tampere University)

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) second-hand e-commerce – online transactions conducted between consumers – has increased exponentially recently. In addition to its economic relevance, buying second-hand products can help us achieve a more sustainable way of living by preserving natural resources. Hence, research into topics such as competition in two-sided markets, consumer motivation, and consumer trust has proliferated in recent years. However, this research stream has mainly focused on factors relevant to transactions; research on how customers experience the C2C second hand online journey is missing. Customer experience (CX) is generally defined as the customer’s spontaneous responses and reactions to offering-related stimuli throughout a customer journey. Understanding the CX that emerges in C2C second-hand e-commerce is important because it extends attention from second-hand transactions to more holistic and multi-dimensional experiences that emerge throughout the entire customer journey. Furthermore, CX can influence customers’ attitudes and behaviors toward this more sustainable form of commerce. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to develop a conceptual framework for C2C e-commerce experience. We adopt a propositional approach to build a conceptual framework. We first delimited C2C second-hand e-commerce to online transactions of used products between consumers mediated by a platform. We then reviewed relevant articles from complementary research streams: C2C e-commerce, sharing economy, collaborative consumption, and circular economy. Next, we analyzed these articles through the CX lens. This resulted in a customer journey map that showed the most relevant stimuli to which customers respond, touchpoints, experiential responses, and individual and collective contextual factors that might influence these responses throughout the customer journey. We classify these stimuli into three elements that are characteristic of the C2C e-commerce phenomenon: people, product and platform. In addition, we build a series of propositions that argue how stimuli in the C2C e commerce context can interact to generate different customer experiences. For example, we identified treasure hunting as affective experiential responses to finding items that are considered a treasure or a bargain. This experience is the result of an interaction between the product characteristics (e.g., its value and uniqueness), the seller’s characteristics (e.g., how they describe themselves), and the platforms’ pricing mechanism (e.g., auction mechanisms). We contribute to the CX literature by enriching understanding of the dynamic emergence of experiential responses. Our findings show that CX emerges as responses to the interaction between sellers, products, and platforms rather than to these elements separately. Furthermore, we show how CX evolves during the customer journey, from self-focused to other-focused experiential responses and find that customer response can be the result of interactions between stimuli, not only two-way but also three-way interactions. We also contribute to the C2C e-commerce literature by going beyond motivations and transactions to mapping experiential responses throughout the whole customer journey. Finally, we identify understudied topics that allow us to build a research agenda. For example, research on touchpoints in the post-purchase of second hand C2C e-commerce is almost non-existent. Overall, we aim to advance conceptual understanding and future studies in both domains: C2C e-commerce and CX literature.

Ninth Session, V Edition of the Brown Bag Seminars, presented the last wednesday 8 of March in a online meeting session held at the Scholl of Economics and Business in the University of Zaragoza.