Looking Back to Move Forward: Insights from Bibliometric Mapping and an Umbrella Review of Innovation in E-Commerce and Digital Commerce Platforms

As e-commerce becomes a standard market infrastructure, competitive advantage increasingly depends on how firms and platforms innovate within digital commerce ecosystems. This article provides a systematic and comprehensive synthesis of research on innovation in e-commerce and digital commerce platforms. The study investigates the field using two methodological approaches: bibliometric analysis and an umbrella review, organized according to the SPAR-4-SLR protocol. The bibliometric analysis was conducted through co-word analysis using the Bibliometrix R package on a final corpus of 122 Web of Science articles published between 2016 and May 2026. This analysis produced a thematic map comprising ten keyword clusters positioned across all four quadrants according to their centrality and density metrics. These bibliometric insights were triangulated with the findings of an umbrella review of 12 peer-reviewed review studies, which synthesized prior evidence on the innovation focus of e-commerce and digital commerce platform research. The results show that the field is expanding rapidly but remains conceptually fragmented. By integrating both analyses, the study develops a future research agenda focused on responsible AI implementation, comparative analyses across different types of companies, and broader geographical coverage.