TY - GEN
T1 - COVID-19 and E-commerce Operations
T2 - 42nd International Conference on Information Systems: Building Sustainability and Resilience with IS: A Call for Action, ICIS 2021 TREOs
AU - Han, Brian Rongqing
AU - Sun, Tianshu
AU - Chu, Leon Yang
AU - Wu, Lixia
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 42nd International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2021 TREOs: "Building Sustainability and Resilience with IS: A Call for Action". All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - containment measures
KW - COVID-19
KW - digital resilience
KW - E-commerce
KW - logistics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85190707615&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85190707615&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85190707615
T3 - 42nd International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2021 TREOs: "Building Sustainability and Resilience with IS: A Call for Action"
BT - 42nd International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2021 TREOs
PB - Association for Information Systems
Y2 - 12 December 2021 through 15 December 2021
ER -