A Complementor Strategy Based on Fit With Platforms and Competition Among Products

Within platform markets, research is dominated by the platform owner’s perspective. This study takes the complementor perspective and investigates how complementors can decrease the timeframe needed to sell their products on the platform. Products could have various degrees of fit with different platforms, ranging from bad to excellent. Therefore, we introduce a new concept, namely fit between a product and platform, and develop two district measures for it: the number of subcategories and the number of details in product presentation on the platforms. Based on survival analyses and Rubin’s potential outcomes framework, we observe a negative relationship of fit with the timeframe needed to sell a product. More specific, complementors will be able to sell 10% faster when aligning their products to the more appropriate platforms. Another element that is researched in this study is the competition among products. We identify an inverted U-shaped relationship, signaling that the benefits of indirect network externalities only hold up to a certain extent for complementors, after which the disadvantages of crowdedness dominate. This contradicts current literature from the platform owner’s perspective, which mentions that the benefits of indirect network externalities take place without boundaries.