Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

The marketplace for mobile payments services is an arena of intense competition among many multinational and national players. The attractiveness of this marketplace to the providing brands takes in the fact that this provision is a gateway to other fintech services and markets. Thus branding is vital to a lasting embedding and continuing success. The authors of the opening paper of this International Journal of Electronic Commerce issue examine the effects of cross-side network effects on brand equity and consumer loyalty in the mobile payments marketplace. Xiang Gong, Christy M.K. Cheung, Kem Z.K. Zhang, Chongyang Chen, and Matthew K.O. Lee develop a multilevel characterization of the supplyside components leading to the cross-side network effects in the present context. They proceed to examine empirically the impact of these complementary components on brand equity and consumer loyalty as the demand-side effects. A nuanced treatment of the three aspects of consumer loyalty is offered. The paper both expands our understanding of the contextualized cross-side network effects and helps in strategic action in an increasingly vital marketplace. Human–computer negotiation (HCN) has been underplayed both in research and practice of e-commerce. The human negotiators can act in their own behalf or on behalf of organizations. With the complexities of the “human element,” HCN is far more difficult to realize than the computer-to-computer negotiation, the future of which is expected to be bright as more advanced blockchain applications come on stream. Therefore, the next paper’s contribution is important not only by offering a tested design of a software agent for HCN but also by furthering the agenda of automating the dynamics of the human–computer interaction in e-commerce transactions. Mukun Cao, Qing Hu, Melody Y. Kiang, and Hong Hong follow the precepts of design science and demonstrate the effectiveness of an automated agent that can dynamically select from an assortment of four negotiation strategies. In the experiments run by the authors, their agent outperforms the benchmark single-strategy models with respect to the settlement ratio and joint negotiation outcomes. Shopping online, consumers generally encounter numerous websites to buy from. How to choose? Various attributes of the website, such as trust-enhancing labels, should play a role. They do not if they will not be noticed. The sellers may attempt to differentiate themselves by offering superior delivery terms or return benefits. This will be in vain if not easily seen by the website visitor. Leonard Maaya, Michel Meulders, and Martina Vandebroek deploy the attribute nonattendance approach to study empirically the effects of providing the holistic website information in an accessible format. The authors model the potential switching behavior of consumers in a novel fashion that renders a more nuanced understanding of the better information provision by the websites to the consumers of different characteristics. We should always remember that the domain of e-commerce includes prominently the intraorganizational subdomain. Here, Yuan Sun, Lixia Wu, Rui Chen, Kuikui Lin, and Rong-An Shang empirically study the impact of the use of enterprise social software on the improvisation ability of the teams that deploy these platforms, such as Slack or Jive. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE 2020, VOL. 24, NO. 3, 277–278 https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2020.1767425