A Study on the Choice of Online Marketplace Co-Opetition Strategy Considering the Promotional Behavior of a Store on an E-Commerce Platform

The huge traffic of e-commerce platforms provides a wide market for stores, but the fierce competition among stores for onsite traffic increases the cost of onsite promotion for stores, and it also reduces the effectiveness of promotion. Therefore, more and more stores on e-commerce platforms are using content platforms for offsite promotion. In the face of stores’ onsite and offsite promotion behaviors, the choice of competition and cooperation strategies among participants in the promotion process is the key to solving the problem of increasing traffic. Accordingly, this paper constructs an onsite and offsite promotion decision model consisting of an e-commerce platform, a store on the e-commerce platform, and a content platform, and it compares the results based on the decentralized decision situation, centralized decision situation, and promotion investment sharing situation. In addition, some results are presented in more detail in the form of numerical analysis. The results show that the promotion investment sharing does not change the level of onsite promotion investment, but the centralized decision makes the onsite promotion investment decrease; promotion investment sharing and centralized decision scenarios increase the promotion investment of the e-commerce platform and the content platform. When the sum of the parts of promotion investments shared by the store and the content platform for the e-commerce platform is relatively small, each participant will be willing to participate in the promotion investment sharing agreement. We believe that this study will provide important implications for the resolution of stores’ traffic dilemmas on e-commerce platforms.