Ecosystems : Vendor-Sided Characteristics of Online Marketplaces

For several years, marketplaces exist in the software industry, where customers can, for instance, search for specific services offered by different vendors, review, buy and use these services. The vendor-sided characteristics of these marketplaces are widely discussed but have not yet been investigated in detail. In this paper, we consider online marketplaces and the participants as part of a Software Ecosystem. First, we derive vendor-sided characteristics of a Software Ecosystem from existing literature and introduce FaDOM – a newly developed software Framework for Automated Data Collection in Online Marketplaces. On basis of the collected data, we analyze vendor-sided characteristics of five online marketplaces.

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