3.2 Regression results and analysis
3.2.1 The impact of PV and business model on firm performance
The estimation results of Eq. (3) is reported in Table3. R-squared is 0.873468 which indicates that PV and business model can explain a 87% change of revenue. The P value of PV is 0 which shows PV has a strong positive relation with firm performance at the level of 1%, and the coefficient of business model and firm performance is 7065.785 which the match of business model with e-commerce firms has strong impact on firm performance.
3.2.2 The impact of financing ability and SEM on firm performance
The estimation results of Eq. (4) is reported in Table 4. It shows that PV have a strong positive relation with firm performance while financing ability have a strong negative relation with e-commerce firm revenue. The reason that financing ability increases while e-commerce firm revenue decreases is that massive capital inputs are used as extended reproduction. The result identifies the paradox of massive inputs and low returns to inputs in e-commerce.
The load time have a slight negative relation with firm performance, which indicate that the shorter the load time is, the better e-commerce firm performance is. Thus, one of the ways of SEM is to shorten the load time and improve the website quality.
4. Conclusions and Remarks
This paper explores the relationship of SEM, financing ability and firm performance based on the
empirical research of China’ B2C e-commerce firms. Some suggestive results are given as follows.
First, PV has a strong positive relation with e-commerce firm performance. It shows that users are the core resource in e-commerce and thus it is necessary to attract users by search engine marketing (SEM). It also gives a sight on the importance of strengthening consumer relationship management.
Secondly, financing ability has a strong negative relation with e-commerce firm performance. It indicates that the low returns to inputs in e-commerce due to the start-up nature. The returns of inputs can not be present immediately because it has a lag effect in time.
Thirdly, business model and SEM have a strong positive relation with e-commerce firm performance. In order to gain long term competitive advantages, it is hence necessary for managers to focus on business model innovation and SEM.
Acknowledgements
This work has been partially supported by grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.71331005) and Major International (Regional) Joint Research Project (No. 71110107026)