Let’s join forces: boundary resources as enablers of value co-creation in e-commerce ecosystems

Digital technologies, as enablers and catalysts of digital transformation, propel inter-company collaboration and value co-creation in platform-centered ecosystems [1‐4]. Platform-centered ecosystems require a set of boundary resources to allow for orchestrated value co-creation [2, 3]. The focal platform’s owner provides these resources as part of platform governance to decide which third parties have access to which boundary resources and how they can be used for value co-creation to satisfy customers [5‐8]. A prominent example of such value co-creation is e-commerce, with an expected accumulated global revenue of US $6.4 trillion in 2024 [9]. Several successful transaction platforms (i.e., digital marketplaces) currently dominate e-commerce––eg., Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, Flipkart, Mercado Libre, and Rakuten––through their surrounding ecosystems [10]. Amazon generated USD 340 billion in revenue from product and service sales in fiscal year 2020, with more than 60 percent of its revenue coming from commission fees from third-party sellers in its ecosystem [11]. The revenue generated within these ecosystems is up to three times higher than that of the focal platform [12]. These transaction platforms are powered by e-commerce-specific innovation platforms––eg., Magento Commerce, Shopify, and WooCommerce [13]––that provide the infrastructure and application services needed to conduct e-commerce transactions [13, 14].

E-commerce ecosystems comprise various independent participants––eg., manufacturers, sellers, customers, and service providers––that are (digitally) connected [15]. These participants compete for scarce resources (eg., products, supplies) while pursuing the common target of fulfilling customer demand [16]. As e-commerce transactions occur via electronic means [17], the platform owner must implement sophisticated boundary resources to manage the various ecosystem participants [3, 18]. Ghazawneh [19] transferred the concept of boundary objects (eg., repositories, ideal types, coincident boundaries, and standardized forms) from social science to (software) ecosystems [3, 20]. Dal Bianco, Myllarniemi, Komssi, Raatikainen [21] used this description to distinguish between three layers of boundary resources in platform-centered ecosystems: development boundary resources, application boundary resources, and social boundary resources. Recent literature on interorganizational integration and coordination emphasized the application of proper boundary resources [22‐26]. For instance, Schreieck, Ondrus, Wiesche, Krcmar [26] described boundary resources for integrating a platform owner’s multiple platforms, Lindgren, Saadatmand, Schultze [25] introduced boundary resources for collaboration in road haulage, Leong, Lin, Tan, Yu [24] highlighted boundary resources as an important coordinating mechanism in modular platform architectures.

As an “ecosystem leader” [27], a platform’s owner in an e-commerce ecosystem can define boundary resources while setting and enforcing governance rules [16, 28]. Defining the boundaries and demarcation points between a focal platform and ecosystem participants [29] facilitates the execution of strategically relevant decisions about ownership, entry into new markets, and community building [6, 21]. Although many standards for information exchange have been introduced in e-commerce [30‐32], extant research on how standardized boundary resources are defined remains scarce (18, eg., [33]). Most extant literature either focuses the analysis on individual aspects of boundary resource design, eg., the user interface (eg., [34, 35]) or refers to dedicated scenarios [36]. Against this backdrop, our research question is as follows:

To answer the research question, we provide evaluated design principles for the shaping of boundary resources in e-commerce ecosystems based on 14 expert interviews and a subsequent qualitative content analysis [37]. Furthermore, we proposed design guidance in the form of a boundary resource model comprising a set of design rules for platforms in e-commerce ecosystems to reduce barriers to entry for participants and to propel network effects [38] based on a content-structuring approach and our elicitation of focal platform types [39].

The remainder of this research article proceeds as follows. First, we introduce the concepts of e-commerce ecosystems and platform boundary resources. Second, we present our design science research approach involving 14 expert interviews. Third, we introduce a boundary resource model for e-commerce ecosystems. Finally, we summarize and discuss our results and propose future research directions.

E-commerce ecosystems emerge around focal platforms, orchestrating ecosystem participants and enabling transactions among them (Wulfert and Karger, [13]; Wulfert et al., [18]). These platform owners can define and enforce governance rules for interactions with focal platforms (Boudreau, [7]; Hein et al., [28]; Tiwana, [58]). The focal platform’s owners design and implement boundary resources for interactions with other ecosystem participants as a building block of their platform governance (Ghazawneh and Henfridsson, [3]; Eaton et al., [70]; Tiwana et al., [59]).

Following vom Brocke et al.’s [76] guidance, this publication is part of a multi-paper design science research project ([13], eg., 18, 53). We report in this paper about the development of evaluated design principles (Fig. 1) for the design of boundary resources based on Wulfert, Woroch, Strobel, Seufert, Möller [18]. The objective is to increase the confidence in the design principles and improving their fitness for the boundary resources of selected platform types [76]. We further detailed the relation between the initial and updated boundary resources in Appendix A4. With regards to the archetypal movement types suggested by vom Brocke, Winter, Hevner, Maedche [76], our research endeavor is an amplification as we address a similar problem space while providing additional detail for the solution in different platform types.

The research drew from an interview study of 14 domain experts and utilized the framework for minimum reliability evaluation [77] as a theoretical lens to contribute applicable design knowledge as well as address these design principles’ usability by matching them with the relevant platform types, in the e-commerce environment. To formulate the design principles, we applied the structure that Chandra, Seidel, Gregor [78] proposed, including material property and possible actions. Based on the anatomy of design principles [79], the platform owner can implement our derived principles to attract third-party developers to e-commerce ecosystems. Implementing these principles should ease participation into the ecosystems and propel generativity.

Next, we present the evaluated design principles for boundary resources in e-commerce ecosystems. The model managed the internal platform roles and ecosystem participants using a set of seven design principles (DP 1–7) for boundary resources (Fig. 2). Owners of innovation platforms and transaction platforms can implement the boundary resources to facilitate value creation among ecosystem participants and attract third-party developers. We depicted the boundary resources relevant for each platform type based on the information provided by our interviewees. Innovation platforms provide the necessary infrastructure and application services to power a transaction platforms business model. Third-party developers can extend the innovation platform’s services with additional complements. Summarizing the design principles provides a structure for developers and platform owners and enhances the accumulated design knowledge’s tangibility. This utilization of abstract design knowledge was the central practical requirement, according to the interviewees: “What I think would help comprehension is if there would be some overarching structure among the design principles” (5).¹ This enabled us to derive seven evaluated design principles and three platform-internal archetypical roles,– business process owner (BPO), user interface designer (UID), and internal platform developer (IPD) [81]. We further investigated which roles provided substantial information on the seven design principles and which roles claimed design principles within their responsibility (Fig. 2).

In our multi-paper design science research project [76], we developed theoretically grounded and empirically validated design knowledge for boundary resources in e-commerce ecosystems––including social, application, and development boundary resources (Dal Bianco et al., 2014)––and contextualized them for the e-commerce sector (Wulfert et al., 2022). The evaluation of the intermediary design knowledge within a series of interviews with domain expert and their subsequent analysis [37, 83] resulted in an updated set of seven design principles with increased confidence and fitness [76].

We contribute to the literature on e-commerce ecosystems by providing prescriptive design knowledge on the boundaries of innovation and transaction platforms with high confidence and fitness [6, 39]. We also highlighted the inter-company collaboration and multilateral value creation (i.e., joint forces) in e-commerce ecosystems for the benefit of the (final) customer [16]. Moreover, we emphasized the role of third-party developers in e-commerce ecosystems and their implications for the ecosystem’s overall value creation. The ecosystem participants’ joined forces increase the benefit for the (final) customer and the overall ecosystems value. We summarized our design knowledge in an overall framework that is configurable for innovation and transaction platforms (Fig. 2).

Our research also has implications for practitioners. We provided platform owners with concrete recommendations for developing concrete design instances from which they can instantiate boundary resources according to their peculiarities [103, 104]. Following the framework for minimum reusability evaluation and our interview guide [77], our 14 interviewees evaluated the importance and novelty of our overall set of design principles and deemed them important for the orchestration of ecosystem participants in general and third-party developers in particular: “I think that’s why it’s 100% important to address these issues” (10). “It’s good to go through them and compare our system toward them so we can identify which areas need further improvement and where the gaps are” (5). However, some interviewees emphasized prioritization regarding importance within the set of principles (8). Regarding novelty, our interviewees stated that the aggregation of these design principles is novel (3, 5, 14): “The individual design principles are not new, but summarized in this set, it is a good overview that can be given to ecosystem participants” (14). Although the actual boundary resource instances are well known for innovation and transaction platforms, they are not always implemented in practice (7). We also mentioned design instances for boundary resources in the interviewees’ statements.

Furthermore, we considered our design principles’ relevance for platform-internal roles based on interviewees’ job descriptions and explanations [81]. The platform-internal roles are the actual user group of the design principles, as they might instantiate them for concrete boundary resources at innovation and transaction platforms. The BPO is the interface for ecosystem participants and relies on proper conversation and communication of possible system errors and boundary resource updates (DP1, DP6, DP7). UIDs are concerned mainly with intra- and inter-ecosystem standards and guidelines regarding interfaces (DP3, DP4). Guidelines must be communicated accordingly (DP1). The IPD is responsible for the evolution and maintenance of the platform’s technical core (DP2–7). Moreover, our interview analysis revealed that the digital transformation in retail in general and e-commerce in particular remains in its infancy at the company level. Our interviewees stated that incumbent retailers and small and medium-size enterprises often use existing and standardized software (i.e., innovation platforms) provided by software vendors (i.e., Shopify, Magento) (2, 8). They rarely implement their own technical cores and even more rarely open them up to external developers as innovation platforms, possibly due to strong network externalities in existing innovation platforms and winner-take-all tendencies [53]. New platforms would need to distinguish themselves from existing ones and identify possible niches [38]. A potential downside of applying a standardized technical core is that it likely will yield uniform UIs, but interviewees reported that the user interface as a digital storefront is key in distinguishing oneself from competitors (4, 6). Otherwise, competitors could be distinguished only by their product prices [105]. Our interview analysis also indicated that innovation platforms in e-commerce must parcel their services out to enable single developers and smaller groups of developers to participate in e-commerce ecosystems (5, 8, 10, 13). Single developers cannot cope with complex workflows in e-commerce alone. This complexity requires collaboration and value co-creation among third-party developers to provide the focal platforms with useful extensions [5]. In line with existing literature on platform envelopment [106], we also identified a tendency among innovation platforms to integrate successful extensions (7, 9).

In design principle 3, we suggested the connection to “foreign” platform to enlarge the community of third-party developers. This connection also propels developers’ and sellers’ multi-homing given their presence on another platform with the downside of mitigating potential lock-in effects [64, 107‐109]. Connecting two rival platforms can influence ecosystem competition [110‐112] and could provide a pathway to enveloping services of the competing platform [106]. “My opinion is that there is no link between two rival platforms, because the result might be a single marketplace” (2). Our interviewees even mentioned antitrust concerns for platform cooperation and acquisition (2, 4). With changes in the ownership structure of the foreign platform, a full integration of the platform can be achieved [26]. Aside from potential implications on the competition, our interviewees also raised concerns for the technical feasibility of connecting different platform (5, 9, 12, 13).

This research project has limitations that offer interesting avenues for future research. The developed design principles for boundary resources in e-commerce ecosystems focus mainly on attracting third-party developers, but we contacted focal platforms for possible interviewees [82]. Thus, our interviews capture prescriptive knowledge on implemented boundary resources [78], but disregard potential third-party developers’ requirements. Future researchers also might try to interview developers in e-commerce ecosystems about their requirements for successful collaboration and value co-creation. Moreover, we could not interview a user interface expert from a transaction platform. Interviewing additional user interface experts could result in interesting insights for standards and guidelines (DP 4). These design address user interface implementations. Regarding the number of interviews conducted, we followed the literature on qualitative interviews, suggesting sufficiency and saturation as potential indicators [82, 113, 114]. We achieved a high level of sufficiency by approaching a variety of innovation and transaction platforms in e-commerce ecosystems as measured by size (Table 1) and representative interview partners as indicated by their internal roles [81]. We also reached data saturation emphasized by the fact, that our interviewees picked up information that we already documented in previous interviews independently of the platform type [39, 82]. However, future studies could analyze single participants further and roles’ involvement in the design and implementation of boundary resources in innovation ecosystems. Another important future research direction would be to formulate design principles for other ecosystem participants explicitly, eg., retailers and content providers [15]. These additional design principles can be accumulated to develop a holistic design theory [85] concerning attraction and collaboration between a variety of ecosystem participants [115].

Future studies also could add design principles with more concrete design features that can showcase potential instances of prescribed boundary resources and simplify their implementation for platform owners [103, 104]. These design features can resemble an intermediary step in the implementation of concrete design instances (eg., APIs, SDKs) and, thus, simply the implementation of boundary resources [103]. If the design principles are instantiated and implement by the platform-internal roles, researchers and practitioners can also measure the performance of concrete boundary resources, such as the availability of APIs and number as well as frequency of API calls.

Moreover, as our interviewees were working for platforms mainly active in Europe and the U.S., future research may consider e-commerce platforms conducting business in Africa, Asia, and Latin America [63]. Such studies also could include cultural implications on boundary resources [64]. Although they might not impact technical boundary resources, social design principles (eg., ecosystem conversion, extension marketplace) require culture-specific adaptations. Future studies also may analyze the need to implement a boundary resource in connection with platform size, as measured by revenue, number of employees, or number of complementors. Although we derived our design principles from an e-commerce context and interviewees working in the e-commerce sector, several interviewees (3, 10, 11) suggested that the design principles also might apply to (software) ecosystems in other industries [92]. They even mentioned that they would be quite useful for large enterprises. Vom Brocke et al. [76] referred to the application of design knowledge in additional problem spaces as projectability. Although we developed and evaluated the design principles for the e-commerce context, they might be applicable in other contexts. Thus, future studies could evaluate the design principles’ applicability in other contexts to improve their fitness in other domains.

In this paper, we presented seven design principles for implementation of boundary resources in innovation, transaction, and hybrid platforms in e-commerce environments derived from an interview study with 14 domain experts. Benefitting from the interview analysis, we could improve the design principles’ fitness and confidence for innovation and transaction platforms in our multi-paper design’s research approach. Implementing boundary resources using our design principles would generate collaboration among ecosystem participants in general, join ecosystem participants forces, and enable the contribution of of third-party developers to the e-commerce ecosystem’s multilateral value creation in particular. While DP1 mainly focuses on transaction platforms involving a diverse set of ecosystem participants, we also found evidence for ecosystem communication among third-party developers and platform owners. DP2, DP3, and DP5 are concerned with innovation platforms, easing developers’ onboarding and widening the dissemination of their extensions. DP4, DP6, and DP7 are relevant for both types of platforms by enabling improved transaction orchestration and extension quality simultaneously. Hybrid platforms need to implement all boundary resource types to attract ecosystem participants in general and third-party developers in particular. We also introduced three internal platform roles responsible for the implementation of boundary resources, namely business process owner, user interface designer, and internal platform developer. Finally, this paper provides utilizable design knowledge in the form of seven design principles for the design of boundary resources in e-commerce ecosystems.

In Table 2, we depict an excerpt of our coding table consisting of the codes, code descriptions, and anchor examples.

In Table 3, we summarized the total number of coded segments for each code per interview, the total number of coded segments per code, and the total number of coded segments per code.

In Table 4, we indicate the updated design principles initially proposed by Wulfert, Woroch, Strobel, Seufert, Möller [18]., highlighted the main changes in bold for the design principles within this study (left column), and indicated reference interviews that led to the updated design principles.