Resources for value co-creation in e-commerce: a review

Abstract

Recent service perspectives (represented by service---dominant logic, service logic and service science; henceforth, service-logics) provide a mindset for understanding value co-creation as a mutual service process in which firms and customers integrate their resources. The idea that customer and firm resources should be jointly considered to properly explain perceived value is appealing, particularly in interactional settings such as e-commerce. However, we conduct a literature review and show that cross-sectional empirical e-commerce research intended to explain customer value perceptions continues to rely heavily on a unilateral approach (firm resources), which could be misleading. Subsequently, we identify possible barriers for considering service-logics in e-commerce research, which include the lack of a clear definition and classification of resources and an integrated set of valid and reliable measures of resources. We then take a step forward towards overcoming these barriers by providing a summary, a synthesis and new ideas or, at least, a new emphasis on the implications of existing ideas. The new idea/emphasis is that cross-sectional empirical e-commerce research should jointly consider customer resources and firm resources. No prior work has stressed this proposition. We provide a synthesis by re-organizing scarce and scattered service-logics-oriented existing literature on resources to offer a definition and a comprehensive framework for the classification of resources. Finally, we provide a summary by putting together valid and reliable measures of firm resources and customer resources that have been sparsely considered in the 69 studies selected. These measures could be used by researchers in order to model and test value co-creation processes in e-commerce B2C contexts.