Access Is Not the Same as Independence
This series examines the relationship between digital platforms and the small or born-global firms that use them to reach customers beyond their home markets. Its central question is specific: when does global market access stop being a launchpad and become platform dependence? The answer matters because a platform can make a difficult market reachable while also becoming the channel a firm cannot afford to lose. To judge that difference, readers need to look beyond reach and sales. They need to ask which resource the platform supplies, who controls it, whether credible substitutes exist, and whether the economics of access leave the firm enough room to survive.
Two kinds of success that point in different directions
One source approaches the issue at the level of places and entrepreneurial activity. The study Do digital platforms create entrepreneurial opportunities? Evidence from marginal areas examines the entry of Airbnb into 270 Italian Borghi, small or marginal communities. Its abstract reports a staggered difference-in-differences design and says that entrepreneurial activity in the surrounding area increased after Airbnb entered. The reported effect was not uniform: it differed across sectors and was stronger in more economically depressed areas. In the authors’ account, the platform acted as an external enabler, changing what entrepreneurs could do in places where conventional economic conditions were unfavorable.
That is an important kind of success. A platform can make a place visible to people who would not otherwise find it, or create enough demand for an activity to become worth attempting. It can also absorb or bundle parts of the work that would otherwise require a new business to build its own operating infrastructure. In a marginal location, lowering those barriers may be the difference between an opportunity remaining theoretical and someone deciding to act on it.
The other source follows one firm rather than a population of firms. E-commerce platform dependence: a double-edged sword for born global firms? reconstructs the experience of Mukako, an Italian company selling products for families with young children, as it entered China through Alibaba’s Tmall Global platform. Mukako’s flagship MUtable was a differentiated educational play table, and the case reports strong interest and visibility in China. Tmall gave the company a route to consumers and associated selling and logistics services that would have been difficult for a small foreign entrant to build independently.
But the same relationship also placed Mukako in a vulnerable position. The case article links the platform arrangement to high fees, continuing marketing requirements, low margins, operating losses, and eventually insolvency proceedings. The brand was sold to Stokke in 2021. The product’s apparent appeal did not prevent the firm from running out of room financially. Access had helped solve the problem of reaching China; it had not solved the problem of retaining enough value from each sale to keep the whole business viable.
These findings are not contradictory because they describe different units and different outcomes. The Airbnb study asks whether platform entry is associated with more entrepreneurial activity around a place. The Mukako case asks what happens to one small firm when a platform becomes central to its route to market. More people may be induced to start businesses while a particular business remains exposed to the terms of the intermediary that makes its market visible. A platform can expand the number of possible ventures and still leave some ventures with little control over the conditions under which they operate.
The diagram shows a possible progression, not a law of platform economics. Access may remain one useful channel among several. Dependence becomes the concern when repeated reliance makes the channel critical and the firm’s alternatives, margins, or ability to negotiate do not keep pace.
What a platform supplies—and what it may come to control
It is tempting to describe a platform as a piece of distribution infrastructure, as though its function were no different from renting warehouse space or buying an advertisement. That description is incomplete. In the evidence available here, the platform can perform several connected jobs: it can make demand discoverable, organize transactions, provide logistics or customer-service functions, and reduce the fixed cost of entering an unfamiliar market. These services explain why a small firm may rationally accept a relationship with a much larger company even when the terms are not ideal.
The term external enabler captures the opportunity side of this relationship. A platform supplies something outside the firm that changes what entrepreneurial action is possible. In the Italian communities studied by Milone, Paolucci, and Raguseo, Airbnb entry was reported to stimulate activity particularly where local conditions were depressed. For Mukako, Tmall supplied access to Chinese consumers and a practical cross-border route. In both settings, the platform did more than announce a product that already had a fully functioning market. It helped assemble the conditions under which a business could be attempted.
Dependence begins with a different question: how difficult would the core business be to continue if the platform disappeared, changed its terms, or became unaffordable? A resource is critical when losing it would disrupt the firm’s central activity, not merely make one task less convenient. A small international firm may be able to replace an ordinary supplier. Replacing the platform that supplies customer reach, visibility, transaction systems, and market-specific logistics may be much harder, especially when the alternative requires a local legal identity, new infrastructure, or a long period of rebuilding demand.
This is why reach and independence should not be treated as synonyms. A platform may give a firm access to customers while retaining control over how those customers can be reached. It may determine what is visible, what is promoted, which services must be purchased, and which channels a seller may use. The firm receives a valuable route to market, but the route is governed by another organization. Its success is then partly a function of decisions it does not fully control.
The relationship can also change over time. At entry, the benefits are easy to see: a new market, new customers, faster learning, and less investment in infrastructure. As sales accumulate through the same channel, however, the firm may concentrate its knowledge, inventory, marketing, and cash flow around that channel. The platform becomes more useful precisely because the firm has integrated with it. That integration can reduce the practical freedom to leave. What began as a way to overcome distance may become a condition for maintaining the business’s current scale.
The issue is not that every powerful platform deliberately turns opportunity into harm, nor that a small firm can remain independent simply by negotiating more assertively. The structural question is whether the platform owner has more alternatives than the firm using the platform. If the owner can replace one seller with another, while the seller cannot replace the owner’s audience or infrastructure, the two sides do not enter the relationship with equal leverage. The difference may show up in contract terms, charges, visibility rules, customer access, or the ability to wait during a negotiation.
Why this distinction matters before the numbers look alarming
Small and born-global firms face a particular version of this problem. They often internationalize early, before they have accumulated large reserves, local networks, or bargaining power. Their strengths may include a specialized product, capable founders, digital operations, and the ability to move quickly across borders. Their weaknesses are the other side of that speed: they must finance product development, production, logistics, customer acquisition, and international market learning at the same time. A platform can compress the time needed to reach a market, but it cannot guarantee that the firm has enough cash to support the resulting growth.
Mukako makes this tension concrete without proving that every born-global firm will follow the same path. The company had a product that attracted attention and a network that helped it produce and distribute that product. Tmall made China accessible more quickly than establishing a separate local operating presence might have done. Yet rapid access also exposed Mukako to a channel whose costs and conditions mattered to every sale made there. The question was therefore not simply whether Chinese customers wanted MUtable. It was whether Mukako could reach those customers on terms compatible with its financial structure and still preserve alternatives.
That framing changes the practical meaning of “platform opportunity.” An opportunity is not only a pool of potential demand. It is a relationship between demand, the cost of reaching it, the capabilities required to serve it, and the share of value the firm can retain. A platform may improve the first variable while worsening the others. A strong sales day can demonstrate that the channel works for discovery and conversion; it cannot by itself demonstrate that the business can fund the next round of visibility, logistics, and service.
The available evidence also calls for restraint. The available record for the Airbnb study is an abstract rather than the full article, so its effect sizes, detailed sample construction, and robustness evidence cannot be assessed. The Mukako work offers a much richer account, including interviews, company documents, media reports, and a resource-dependence interpretation, but it remains a single qualitative case in China. It is best used to understand a mechanism and its warning signs, not to estimate a general failure rate or to make a universal claim about Alibaba, Tmall, or platforms as a class.
The first judgment this series supports is therefore deliberately conditional. Platform access deserves to be valued for the demand and operating barriers it removes. It deserves to be questioned when the firm cannot identify what would replace it, who sets the terms of continued visibility, or how the resulting costs fit the firm’s margin and financing capacity. The important transition is from using a platform to enter to depending on a platform to remain viable. Understanding how the first transition occurs requires starting with the opportunity mechanism itself: how a platform changes the demand and operating conditions facing an entrepreneur.