Using “Super Apps” in Online Retailing Operations: Evidence from a Large Hotel Chain

Abstract

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 retailing 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.

Keywords: super app, online retailing operation, retailing platforms, hotel chain, spillover effect, cannibalization effect