Successful Retailer Strategies in Price Comparison Platforms

The choice of an appropriate e-commerce strategy for the listing in price comparison platforms (eBay, Amazon, price search engines) is crucial for the survival of online stores in B2C e-commerce business. We use a comprehensive data set from the Austrian price search engine geizhals.at to identify successful e-commerce strategies with regard to these listing decisions. An e-commerce strategy is a set of choices including listing, availability, and decisions on the price path and shipping cost. We apply cluster analysis to identify the different strategies that have been used by online retailers. Using various success measures such as revenue, clicks, market share, and the survival of firms we present causal evidence on the effectiveness of different e-commerce strategies.