Nurturing Sales Entrepreneurship in Consumer-to-Consumer Marketplaces

Buyers and sellers jointly determine a market’s development and equilibrium. While the literature has focused on enhancing online marketplaces from the buyer’s perspective, designing marketplaces from the seller’s perspective has received much less attention. Practically, online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplaces have nurtured business and created many job opportunities, evidenced by TaoBao, China’s leading marketplace. This study explores how online marketplaces nurture entrepreneurship from the seller’s perspective. Extending the task-technology fit model, we propose that the entrepreneurial sellers’ motivations to use online C2C marketplaces are to achieve financial security, independence, innovation, recognition, roles and self-realization. C2C marketplaces can be designed accordingly to facilitate information exchange, transactions, customization and back-end integration. We argue that a fit between the seller’s entrepreneurial tasks and technological characteristics determines the seller’s satisfaction, marketplace utilization, and sales performance. The proposed model is verified by 128 TaoBao sellers. We discuss the implications and next steps of this research.