The back-end development team also maintains, upgrades, and plans for any security patches or new features you may need. Over 50 professionals comprise our company, including certified e-commerce developers, tech advisors, UI/UX designers, QA testers and more. To overcome your company’s issues, make use of their specialized industry knowledge. Our specialists test your products via various programs, applications and services to make sure that they work correctly, identify possible errors and security vulnerabilities.
When there are competing platforms in your space, users need some reason to believe that your platform will be worth joining, especially if doing so involves a significant investment, as is the case with game consoles. To attract initial users, a new platform must satisfy those concerns by building credible expectations for its future success. These strategic choices are all largely within the control of a platform designer. As first envisioned, a platform might require thousands of diverse users—hundreds of taxi drivers in every city, or a full suite of movies playable on a new device.
Virtual Platforms for Government Services in COVID-19 and Beyond: A Sociomaterial Case Study of Passport Service in Ghana
In the UK, market inquiries have been used to address markets which are not working well, and this has seen proposals for a ‘Strategic Market Status’ to be applied to platforms (Fletcher, 2022). Second, it is important to understand the role of data in the economic power of platforms and their ability to engage in envelopment of smaller rivals and complementors (Condorelli and Padilla, 2020). The result is the ‘moligopoly’ of substantial unilateral economic power on the part of a small number of platforms (Petit, 2020). The power of platforms implies a gatekeeper role, as has been referred to in some identifications of their position (Schnitzer et al., 2021).
We sold the company to a bank and payment processor, which licenses the consumer service to Intuit. We offered a way to move to a completely paper-free billing process, connect with their customers online, and dramatically reduce their costs of billing and collection. You can better understand your customers and easily offer additional products and services. Addressing these competition challenges imply collapsing the boundaries between ex ante economic regulation and ex post competition enforcement, as digital platform development the rules need to evolve with analysis of evolving market power and the level of discipline required. Rules are required for data access, considering incentives for data gathering and analysis and regulate the access arrangements to make them work in practice. The regulation of data is integral to assessment of the wider arrangements on the part of dominant platforms, balancing the potential negative effects of restrictive terms on competition against the efficiency rationales for the arrangements.
Overcome the challenges of delivering CX
In Section 4 we develop this analytical framework further to consider an integrated industrial and competition policy approach to digital platforms in middle-income countries, with a case study focused on South Africa. We conclude by stressing how in middle-income countries calls for regulation of the platforms, including data localisation, have largely not articulated the critical links between data, platforms and the development of domestic industrial capabilities. We consider the heterogeneity and dynamic nature of the digital platform dynamics to build on the insights of Hymer’s efficiency contradiction and Cowling’s theory of monopoly capitalism and how it may be overcome. In areas such as fast fashion, weak local capabilities mean that the South African industry does not have a good base from which to build (Andreoni et al., 2021B). While growth opportunities may well exist, a digital industrial policy is required to build the capabilities in local ecosystems, in which regulation of digital platforms needs to play an important complementary role, if countries are to by-pass the middle-income technology trap.
- Excel SoftSources understands the positive impact your online platform can have when given the level of care you deserve at every stage of software development.
- The most successful platforms connect two or more types of users—buyers and sellers on a shopping portal, travelers and hotel operators on a booking service—and a strong launch usually requires convincing early users to join even before the platform reaches scale.
- The tendency to concentration and economic power is inherent in the economics of platforms, as it is in the rationales for the internationalisation of business (Cowling and Sugden, 1987; Cowling and Tomlinson, 2011).
- A business only needs to plan how to offer content/service to its end users and advance the product according to the trending technology.
By doing so we also update the concept of ‘optimal competition’ proposed by Amsden and Singh (1994) in the study of Korea and Japan, to advance policy recommendations for today’s middle-income countries facing digital platform power. This means that the role of complementors which interface with, and layer on top of the main platforms, are critically important for middle-income countries. The impact of self-preferencing, such as by e-commerce platforms (where partner suppliers are favoured in the presentation and ranking of products) and Google in tourism, is not surprisingly what has been tackled first in a number of countries such as Turkey, India and South Korea. These cases address discrimination against local producers on international platforms; however, the discrete enforcement actions only scratch the surface of the challenges posed by platforms.
Table of Content
In our view, the platform development lifecycle shown above provides ideas, guidelines and reference information for both industrial as well as innovation projects. Of course, each project is bounded by its requirements, methodology, plan etc. and there can be much debate about the merits of individual phases and activities shown in the figure. One thing, however, is certain that having clear ideas and reference information helps in planning and improving the development activities.
From 2006 to 2013, Google banned the creation of tools to help advertisers copy their campaigns from AdWords into competing search engines like Microsoft Bing and Yahoo. Only when competition regulators challenged the practice (after I flagged it in 2008 testimony) did Google lift the restriction—a move that now enables one-click copying to other ad platforms. At its launch, in 2007, Apple’s category-defining iPhone had no capacity for users to install apps from third parties. (Apple added the App Store and third-party apps more than a year later.) The company provided selected tools through preinstalled apps, but initially users could not add programs from anyone else. Having built a general-purpose review platform, Yelp could have tried publishing reviews of all businesses everywhere from the outset. Instead, it stayed focused on a narrow sector until it had attracted devoted fans and higher-quality content, which paved the way for subsequent success.
Digital Experience Platform
As the Groupon case illustrates, pay-as-you-go pricing is a feasible option in more and more cases because technology can easily capture and record individual transactions automatically. It would not have been feasible to equip an early fax machine with a counter that recorded how many pages were sent and received. Anyone renting a device with a by-the-page fee would have had a strong incentive to turn back the dial to reduce fees, and a tamper-proof counter would have added to the cost of an already-expensive device.
The ubiquity of internet access has caused a sharp rise in the number of businesses offering platforms that connect users for communication or commerce. Entrepreneurs are particularly drawn to these platforms because they create significant value and have modest operating https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ costs, and network effects protect their position once established—users rarely leave a vibrant platform. President Ramaphosa of South Africa observed that ‘[e]conomic growth will be driven by the leaner and more adaptable small- and medium-sized businesses of the future.
Data Integration Platform
For example, commercial radio stations are two-sided platforms bringing listeners and advertisers together, shaped by content. However, most platforms can place various restrictions on different user groups to tie them into their platform by leveraging on the network effects and data aggregation. Rules can aid switching, as is the case with rules relating to bank clients’ data being available via credit reference bureau which enable people to shop around for mortgages. The evolution of business enterprises into multinational and transnationals is evidently driven by both value creation and value capture, and extraction dynamics. These dynamics are intrinsically linked to the co-existence of rivalry and collusion. It is driven by value creation dynamics due to asset-specific and scale-intensive investments and innovations, and industry coordination among non-market hierarchies – value creation via economies of growth and diversification (Schumpeter, 1942; Penrose, 1959; Pitelis, 1991).
In fact, when people started using Paytrust, they’d make payments to themselves first to see if it worked. So we focused our marketing on frequent e-mail users and people with at least one e-commerce transaction to their name. We also looked for people who traveled a lot, or who had second homes, because they risked not receiving paper bills on time. We focused on urban areas, where many people pay the same companies, which made bill conversion easier.
Developing the value perception of the business customer through service modularity
Recognising the dynamic nature of value creation and extraction in evolving business models enabled by digital platforms means rethinking the role of the state and regulation. An ‘entrepreneurial-regulatory’ state is required to support local capabilities in a world of digital platform competition. This differs from a state with separate regulatory bodies on sectoral lines and separate government bodies to address market failures in areas such as development finance, research and development and skills. An entrepreneurial-regulatory state recognises the central role of data which is collected and analysed by platforms cutting across consumer search, payments, finance, communications and media.