Editor’s Introduction 29(2)
Vladimir Zwass
International Journal of Electronic Commerce,
Volume 29, Number 2, 2025, pp. 183-184.
The works included in the present issue of the International Journal of Electronic Commerce demonstrate collectively how the nexus between marketing and information technology can produce salutary outcomes for branding and product development. Indeed, the inexorable progress of e-commerce that occupies this nexus is, to a large degree, conditioned by its synergistic expansion. The research work we publish is aimed at making a significant contribution to this progress. Equally, the concluding paper of the issue makes an important novel contribution to our battle with fake online reviews, now deploying deep learning in the multimodal (text and images) context of such reviews.
Luxury brands had long eschewed the e-commerce space perceived by them as “downmarket.” No longer. Skillfully managing their image and performance online, such brands are now a presence that—at best—combine the image of exclusivity with the ability to include the larger clientele who now prefer to explore and purchase across brands. Here, Shubin Yu, Soojin Roh, and Huaming Liu investigate empirically how the response speed afforded by luxury retailers online affects the customers’ perception of luxury brands. The authors show that in the case of such brands slow response to customer queries may actually enhance the image of brand exclusivity, provided the interaction between the customer and the brand is otherwise of a high perceived quality. The authors offer additional insights, all of them pointing to the distinctions between brand management in the case of products seeking exclusivity and those addressing the mass market.
Another marketplace seeking distinctiveness for its products is that for sustainable fashion, where reduced environmental impact and other societal values are sought. Jialiang Yang, Hai Guo, and Shaobo Wei deploy their theory-driven empirics to establish how pricing (in this price-sensitive market) and promotion affect customer satisfaction. The innovation in the authors’ approach is to consider both factors in conjunction with each other. The results are nuanced and—beyond contributing to the theories of product distinctiveness—well placed to influence the positioning of the brands that frequently seek their success online.
The ever more popular livestreaming platforms are aiming to expand their profile as e-retail vehicles. While the platforms are popular in the aggregate, their proliferation is a challenge to profitability, and effective product sales may lead to a competitive advantage. In the next paper, Lijuan Luo, Yuwei Wang, Yujie Zheng, and Yufei Yuan present their research, rooted in the empirical linguistics, that aims to seek impactful sales performance on such platforms. The authors base themselves in the signaling and other theories to analyze extensive data from a well-known livestreaming platform, while dichotomizing both the verbal content and the linguistic style of the streamers’ language. As the result, they offer both theoretical insights and actionable advice in advancing sales prospects on livestreaming platforms.
Social media have enabled the building of personal brands. In fact, they have become a powerful tool for a bottom-up development of personality-tied entrepreneurship, from the broad reach of influencers to the initiatives of practicing professionals, doctors among them. Here, Wenchao Du, Yabin Yang. Xitong Guo, and Doug Vogel present their investigation of the impact of the engagement of these professionals in social media on the returns from their practice. The results are highly encouraging to those who would skillfully employ these media for personal branding—across the professions and trades.
Fake reviews are the bane of e-commerce. In spite of the elaborate measures taken against them, they do proliferate. In the concluding paper of the issue, Wei Du, Jianlan Li, Jilei Zhou, Qi Lu, and Yue San deploy deep learning to combat multimodal fakes, those that combine text and images. It should be noted that the inclusion of images may increase the believability of such reviews, and thus this work is an important contribution to the extensive research regarding online reviews in our field. The authors combine the intramodal detection techniques (text and images separately) with the multimodal ones. With a real-world dataset, the researchers demonstrate the effectiveness of their method in the detection of fake reviews.