E-Commerce Meets Emerging Technologies: An Overview of Research Characteristics, Themes, and Trends

The rise of e-commerce platforms has completely revolutionized the way in which consumers interact with the market. In our digital world, due to the evolution of technology, people can purchase with ease the desired products, regardless of time and place, directly from their personal devices. This has led to a considerable improvement in users’ experiences, saving both time and money and avoiding stores’ congestions. At the same time, the emerging technologies, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and blockchain, registered a substantial contribution to optimizing e-commerce platforms by enhancing the efficiency of the processes, better understanding users’ needs, and offering personalized solutions. Therefore, the present bibliometric investigation aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the research domain-electronic commerce exploration using emerging technologies. Based on a dataset collected from the Web of Science database, the study reveals key details of the field, research characteristics, main themes, and current trends. Within the analysis, the R-tool—Biblioshiny 4.2.1—has been used for the creation of tables, graphs, and visual representations. The high importance of the domain, together with the significant interest within academics in publishing papers around this area, is validated by the value obtained for the annual growth rate, more specifically 44.65%, as well as by the cross-validation analyses performed in VOSviewer 1.6.20 and CiteSpace 6.3.R1, along with topic analysis performed through Latent Dirichlet Allocation and BERTopic. The results of this research represent precious information for the scientific community, authorities, and even companies that are oriented to e-commerce platforms, since crucial details about the market trends, domain’s impact, and key contributions are exposed.