A Research Survey of Electronic Commerce Innovation: Evidence from the Literature

The development of technology has ignited many innovations in business management, especially in the electronic commerce area. The essential example, that is, online stores and online shopping, is a critical evolution and innovation from traditional brick-and-mortar stores to clicks and mortar. Following previous research (Van Oorschot et al.), this present study adopted bibliometric and keyword analysis to review the main characteristics of electronic commerce innovations. Focused on the academic sources, the research data used in this study were searched for and collected from the Web of Science (WoS), a renowned academic database which covers the most influential research journals in electronic commerce. Based on a combination of several keywords related to “innovation” and “electronic commerce,” the keyword search in the WoS was conducted in May 2019. As a result, a total of 334 research articles related to electronic commerce innovations were collected. Derived from the bibliometric analysis, some keywords that were seldom used in the earlier decade (2000-2009), but which rapidly grew in use in the recent decade (2010-2018) were found, including m-commerce, platforms, social commerce, online review, and co-creation. In addition, the top 10 influential articles listed in each of the two decades were identified. The results show some of the research trajectories in EC innovations. In the first decade (2000-2009), the top 10 papers focused on traditional IT adoption, such as self-service technology, enterprise resource planning systems, and the adoption of general attitude-intention theories such as the technology acceptance model. In the recent decade (2010-2018), researchers have shown more diverse interest in innovative EC applications, such as RFID applications, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, etc. Accompanying these EC innovation contexts, in addition to general attitude-intention theories, more theories such as signaling theory, have been adopted