Operational Risk Management in E-Commerce: A Platform Perspective

This study presents a risk management framework for e-commerce platform firms to identify and prioritize risks, and devise action plans to mitigate them. E-commerce platforms can use the framework as an efficient decision-support tool for recognizing and managing risks. To analyze e-commerce risks from a platform firm point of view, we apply a fuzzy quality function deployment (FQFD) methodology to identify and map e-commerce risks for the platform and define an action plan to guide proper mitigation and control. Although the literature recognizes cybersecurity as one of the main risks for e-commerce platforms, our results demonstrate that weakness in operations integration is the main issue for e-commerce platforms. In fact, the lack of operations integration causes irrational response time, delays in timely solutions to issues, inaccurate responses, low agent courtesy, and a high churn rate. Therefore, even if e-commerce platforms use modern technologies to solve cybersecurity issues, the lack of integration among relevant processes leads to low-quality services and, consequently, low performance. Finally, after identifying and categorizing risks for e-commerce platforms we offer a real action plan to promptly mitigate them.