Abstract

Peer-to-peer online sales platforms have increasingly become more “social” as they incorporate IT-enabled features such as discussion forums, following members and sharing favorite items. By using these social features, platform members are offered a unique opportunity to engage with a community of buyers and sellers. Yet, whether and how individual sellers on online sales platforms benefit from community engagement is not well-understood. We analyze an exploratory data set from Etsy.com to address this issue. Our results show that engaging with community members does not only satisfy in-trinsic motivations for participation in the community but also has an economic impact on sellers. Spe-cifically, after controlling for seller tenure, the number of shop items, and average price, the analysis shows that the number of followers is positively associated with sales. We discuss potential mechanisms that explain our empirical findings and discuss theoretical and practical implications.

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