LIMITS OF IMITATING MARKETPLACE DESIGN: THE CASE OF AN AUTOMOTIVE SERVICE MARKETPLACE

In recent years, platform-based service marketplaces emerged as a new way of software and service deployment which radically changed the mobile service domain. Today, platform-based service marketplaces like Apple’s App Store dominate the field of mobile service deployment and have proven to be an enormous competitive advantage. At present, this concept is diffusing into other domains like the automotive industry. Desiring to make use of this competitive advantage, car manufacturers strive to explore its possibilities. However, to date there is no thriving platform-based service marketplace in this industry. Thus, this paper aims to describe the identified challenges in designing an automotive service marketplace. The authors present the results of a Delphi study based on a qualitative study, embedded in an industry research project, exploring the design of an automotive service marketplace. The results emphasize on the identified critical design issues in the automotive domain and provide evidence that imitating platform-based marketplace design from one domain to another has limits. Therefore, the authors suggest addressing the open issues by implementing an independent management body that can dynamically adjust the design.