Factors Affecting Consumer-to-Consumer Sales Volume in e-Commerce

Evaluation matrices in online platforms are key parts in Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplaces. Among the C2C platform providers, Taobao plays an important role in the Chinese virtual market. In this paper, the authors aim at identifying the various indexes for the evaluation matrices system and investigate the influential factors on the performance of the merchants on the platform, which are generally measured by the sales volume. Apple's iPhone 7 plus is selected as the sample product in this study. Besides the sellers of this product, sales data and sellers' indexes are collected and analyzed via various statistical techniques. Our results show that accumulated credit, consumer favorable rate, matching score and consumer service rate have a positive impact on sales. Accumulated credit has the strongest influence on sales, and service score has a negative influence on sales. Finally, our recommendations for C2C sellers are provided according to the findings.