Unboxing the Role of E-Commerce Ecosystems to Address Grand Challenges

The modern world is confronted with grand challenges, such as those codified by the United Nations Agenda 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While single organizations are often not capable to address a broad set of goals on their own, we can observe an increasing creation of e-commerce ecosystems. Although owners of focal platforms in e-commerce ecosystems wield the power to foster and implement sustainability, there is a demand for identifying and organizing corresponding initiatives and actionable guidance. This paper analyzes how e-commerce ecosystem participants implement sustainability through a multiple-case study featuring a set of 112 initiatives from sustainability reports. Our results show that (1) sustainability initiatives lay a particular emphasis on the reduction in inequality and management of climate change as well as (2) manufacturers, sellers, and service providers are the most involved ecosystem participants. Based on that, we (3) synthesized six categories of sustainability initiatives as measurements.