关键词: 社群电商, 效率, 两阶段关联DEA, 路径

Abstract: Community e-commerce, a new business model, has been bred by the amalgamation of e-commerce and social media. There exists a great difference between community e-commerce and traditional e-commerce. One is that user traffic comes from different sources. While public domain traffic is the main source of traffic on traditional e-commerce platforms, traffic on community e-commerce platforms is mainly private. The second difference is decentralization. Community owners connect the platforms and consumers, weakening the centralized characteristics of traditional e-commerce platforms. There have been studies of traditional e-commerce, but how to scientifically evaluate the efficiency of community e-commerce generated by private domain traffic still remains unclear. This paper explores how to improve traditional efficiency evaluation methods for community e-commerce and studies the quantitative interpretation of operation efficiency based on the internal mechanisms of community e-commerce.
According to the characteristics of community e-commerce, this paper defines two stages: “Recruitment” and “Transformation”, to describe the process of enterprises acquiring users, building communities, operating communities, and promoting products to achieve value creation and value capture. In this paper, to build a two-stage correlated DEA model, we introduce “the number of community owners” and “the number of community members” as two intermediate indicators which can reflect the scale of community. In the Recruitment stage, the number of employees and the cost of main business are selected as input variables, while the number of community owners and community members are selected as output variables to measure the company’s ability to acquire user bases and cultivate communities. In the Transformation stage, the number of community owners and community members are selected as input variables, while the income of main business and the rate of purchase again are selected as output variables to measure the ability of the enterprise to convert community resources into revenue and profits. We measure the efficiency of community e-commerce based on the survey questionnaire about community e-commerce enterprises in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
The results show that there exists divergence in the efficiency of community e-commerce enterprises in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Most enterprises possess low-level general efficiency and scale efficiency, and merely half of them can achieve effective technical efficiency. To compare the two stages, the general efficiency and scale efficiency of the “Recruitment stage” are relatively lower than that of the “Transformation stage”, but the technical efficiency is not much different in the two stages. We provide managerial insights for enterprises: We conduct an input-output analysis of representative individual enterprises, and further propose corresponding improvement measures. The high logistics costs and slow delivery caused by geographical location affect scale efficiency and constrain the development of community e-commerce in Xinjiang. Policy recommendations are also provided for the government. Based on the two-stage analysis of efficiency, this paper proposes a reasonable path to improving the efficiency of community e-commerce in Xinjiang: Enterprises should get through the dilemma of low efficiency by improving scale efficiency and forming scale effects. Specifically, increasing the category of products supplied, improving the capability of community service, and intensifying the development of logistics can promote the formation of scale effects, so as to improve the efficiency of community e-commerce enterprises.

Key words: community e-commerce, efficiency, two-stage DEA, paths