Conference Theme Track B: IS for Resilience
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Paper Number
2023
Paper Type
Completed
Description
This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 on e-commerce sales. We collect city-day panel data over two years, representing daily sales from Alibaba's e-commerce platform across 339 cities in Mainland China. We identify the overall impact of COVID-19 by a year-on-year comparison, the effect of COVID-19 intensity by contrasting cities with different confirmed cases, and the impact of government containment measures by leveraging policy variation. The results consistently suggest that e-commerce sales respond to the pandemic with an immediate decrease followed by a fast recovery, i.e., digital resilience. Moreover, we find that except for the rare case of complete shutdowns, government containment measures in most cities have a relatively small negative impact on e-commerce. Finally, combining data on logistics delivery and customer ordering processes, we identify a key operational driver---logistics capacity---that significantly explains the decline and recovery of e-commerce sales.
Recommended Citation
han, Brian Rongqing; Sun, Tianshu; Chu, Leon Yang; and Wu, Lixia, "COVID-19 and E-commerce Operations: Evidence from Alibaba" (2021). ICIS 2021 Proceedings. 7.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2021/is_resilience/is_resilience/7
COVID-19 and E-commerce Operations: Evidence from Alibaba
This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 on e-commerce sales. We collect city-day panel data over two years, representing daily sales from Alibaba's e-commerce platform across 339 cities in Mainland China. We identify the overall impact of COVID-19 by a year-on-year comparison, the effect of COVID-19 intensity by contrasting cities with different confirmed cases, and the impact of government containment measures by leveraging policy variation. The results consistently suggest that e-commerce sales respond to the pandemic with an immediate decrease followed by a fast recovery, i.e., digital resilience. Moreover, we find that except for the rare case of complete shutdowns, government containment measures in most cities have a relatively small negative impact on e-commerce. Finally, combining data on logistics delivery and customer ordering processes, we identify a key operational driver---logistics capacity---that significantly explains the decline and recovery of e-commerce sales.
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02-Resilience