Digital service providers, emerging e-retailers, and rent creation and capture in cross-border e-commerce ecosystem

Abstract

The rise of emerging e-retailers in cross-border e-commerce reflects shifting competitive dynamics in digital ecosystems long dominated by global platform giants. To recalibrate attention from incumbent platform giants to digital service providers (DSPs) and emerging e-retailers, this paper proposes an analytical framework to conceptualize three groups of DSPs—specifically Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), specialized service providers, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)—as accelerators that mediate the creation and capture of information and innovation rents within digital ecosystems. By shifting the analytical focus from platform owners to inter-firm relations between DSPs and emerging e-retailers, the analytical framework of accelerator reveals how DSPs perform distinctive roles and functions in generating and redistributing rents to emerging e-retailers. Applying this framework to the case of fast fashion in China’s cross-border e-commerce, we demonstrate how strategic collaborations between e-retailers and DSPs allow emerging e-retailers to generate and capture information and innovation rents consistently, thereby reshaping their power relations with incumbent platforms within e-commerce ecosystems. This paper not only responds to calls to reconceptualize platform power in the digital economy but also offers a rent-centric analytical perspective on contested upgrading pathways in digital ecosystems.