What are Online Retailers Looking For An Empirical Study of M & A by Online Retailers Short Research Papers

E-commerce has become an important tool for both small and large businesses worldwide and transformed business and industries over the past decades. In this paper, we start from resource-based view and define the two types of M&As of online retailers - online-to-online and online-to-offline M&As. According to RBV, we hypothesize that for internet retailers whose sales are dominantly from online, they are more likely to proceed an online-to-offline M&A than an online-to-online M & A; And for internet retailers whose sales are dominantly from offline, they are more likely to proceed an online-to-online M&A. We will use a sample of online platforms in U.S. to test our hypothesis. Implications for study and future research will be discussed.