Increasing the Organizational Performance of Online Sellers: the Powerful Back-End Management Systems

PurposeThis study examines how customer-linking capabilities, the flexibility of back-end management systems, strategic agility and the perceived absorptive capacity of e-commerce influence the organizational performance of online sellers.Design/methodology/approachA performance model based on the adaptive structuration theory was employed to test the hypotheses using structural equation modeling (SEM) on a dataset of 325 samples with acceptable responses.FindingsThe results reveal that the customer-linking capability and flexibility of back-end management systems, strategic agility and assimilation of e-commerce activity significantly influence organizational performance in a virtual environment.Originality/valueThe agility of online sellers is becoming increasingly important, and from the perspective of adaptive structuration theory, back-end management systems have been built to manage buyer orders for online sellers.