Using “Super Apps” in Online Retailing Operations: Evidence From a Large Hotel Chain
研究了大型连锁酒店采用超级应用作为新零售平台对现有平台销售收入的影响，发现客户会增加预订，但增量主要来自现有平台而非平台转移，且溢出效应集中在离线平台和数字支付平台。
The introduction of super app , a mobile application with comprehensive e-commerce and social media functions, creates a new retailing platform that enables customers to pay to businesses directly. The convenience of mobile payment, the richness of product information, and the easiness of online customer service may induce more demand. This study aims to quantify the effect of adopting a super app as a new platform on the sales revenue of multiple existing platforms. Using transaction data from a large hotel chain, we track the timing that customers started following the company's business account on the super app and identify the effect of adopting the super app as a retailing platform on hotel room reservations. Our results show that the adoption will cause customers to make significantly more reservations. However, a significant proportion of the increase attributes to more transactions through the existing platforms, as customers do not switch from existing platforms to the new super app platform. Interestingly, spillover primarily occurs both on the pre-existing offline platforms and digital payment enabled online platforms. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to examine the economic implications of using a super app as a new retailing platform.