Customer Value Co-Creation Practices in E-Retailing Platform: A Microfoundational Approach

From a microfoundational approach, this paper aims to formulate and validate a comprehensive model that centers on co-creation practices of e-retailing customers. Standing on the service ecosystem view of service dominant logic, the paper proposes e-commerce mechanisms and social capital as antecedents of, and customer empowerment, trust in community of sellers and brand equity as consequents of the practices. We assessed the model through a PLS-SEM analysis on surveyed data of 259 e-commerce customers that evidently supports all hypothesized relationships. The study is one of the first to offer a quantitative multi-level explanation of customer co-creation in e-commerce platforms, in which e-commerce mechanisms (i.e. macro level) affects social capital (micro), social capital associated leads to customer practices (micro-micro), and customer practices interrelated generates empowerment, trust and brand equity (macro), and hence, it is among the first to empirically illustrate the three social mechanisms, namely situational, action-formation, and transformational.