FIRM STRATEGIES FOR DIGITAL TRANSACTION PLATFORMS. Insights on e-commerce and social media platform management

This doctoral dissertation investigates how firms that were not born digital can appropriate value from digital transaction platforms while navigating their broader digital transformation. The overarching enquiry is two-fold: it asks how the adoption of different commercial transaction platforms shapes performance, and which kinds of content published on content transaction platforms most effectively foster stakeholder engagement. The aim is explicitly framed around these two research questions, with the first focused on performance outcomes of platform choice and the second on the engagement consequences of content strategy in social media environments. The investigation is organised as a portfolio of five complementary studies that blend literature synthesis, mixed-method analysis and large-scale quantitative modelling. An initial systematic review maps earlier work on manufacturers’ online-channel management and reveals three intertwined streams that revolve around manufacturer–retailer conflict, price-versus-service trade-offs and supply-chain coordination; together these streams expose conceptual fragmentation and motivate the empirical agenda that follows. Subsequently, a survey of manufacturing SMEs combined with fsQCA and follow-up interviews shows that a strong commitment to e-commerce, when coupled with both direct and agency selling, unlocks affordances such as consumer knowledge generation and internationalisation, which in turn mediate improved on-line performance. A further essay builds on this insight by demonstrating that indirect selling alone rarely suffices; agency marketplaces are accessible stepping-stones for firms with moderate commitment, whereas proprietary direct-selling sites become effective only once commitment is high and sustained. Attention then shifts from transactions to communication. An analysis of tens of thousands of Facebook posts shows that, within family businesses, only the dimensions of heritage, originality and symbolism succeed in eliciting meaningful user reactions, whereas the same cues remain inert when deployed by non-family peers. Finally, a study of more than five thousand posts by leading European banks compares corporate-social-responsibility messaging across Facebook and Instagram. On Facebook, messages that spotlight employee support galvanise interaction, whereas on Instagram the strongest responses are triggered by content that signals diversity and human-rights commitments; environmental or community-oriented claims often fail to resonate. Collectively, these essays advance theory by treating transaction platforms as governance structures whose efficiency depends on their fit with strategic commitment and by integrating resource-based reasoning with affordance theory and transaction-cost economics to explain heterogeneous performance outcomes. They also enrich the engagement literature by showing that the credibility attributed to an organisation—whether stemming from familiness or sectoral expectations—conditions how audiences interpret authenticity and CSR narratives on different social media. Managerially, the work cautions manufacturers against relying exclusively on third-party marketplaces once digital maturity rises, yet recognises those marketplaces as valuable learning laboratories in an early phase. It further advises social-media managers to calibrate authenticity cues to organisational identity and to tailor CSR themes to the expressive culture of each platform if they are to convert online attention into meaningful engagement. The studies acknowledge their cross-sectional and sector-specific constraints, suggesting that future longitudinal and multi-industry research could illuminate how emerging software-as-a-service solutions, sustainability objectives and resilience considerations reshape the platform playbook.