Retail Platform Operations : Practice, Literature and Future Research

Retail platforms have experienced a decade of explosive growth. This growth is accompanied by a huge amount of data from customers and sellers that enables many advanced business analytics techniques. As a result, the management of retail platforms equipped with business analytics has received increasing attention in operations management society. Although the literature has documented the importance of business analytics techniques for retail platforms, a systematic framework of retail platform operations is missing. In this paper, we attempt to fill this important gap based on our observations of the industrial practice and understanding of the academic literature. We propose a framework that broadly classifies retail platform management into three fundamental themes: customer management, seller management, and matching management. In each theme, we identify the key topics and discuss the current practices of platforms, and then review the relevant literature. Based on the literature gap, we propose future research questions with directions for the initial modeling and solution strategy, together with applicable data sources and potential insights. At last, we present a roadmap and datasets for future research on platforms. Overall, this paper lays a foundation for researchers to further explore business analytics applications of retail platforms