While digital technology has given birth to internet-based retail platforms， it has undermined the business models and development paths on which traditional retail platform companies rely， which forced them to engage in business model innovation. Through a comparative analysis of two case firms， Red Star Macalline and IKEA China， it explored the business model innovation （BMI） process of traditional retail platform companies in the context of the digital economy. Based on exploration-exploitation framework， it finds that when environmental changes threaten the core elements of the business model and ecological participants are loosely embedded in the ecosystem， traditional retail platform companies tend to adopt exploratory BMI， using digital technology to innovate value proposition and value creation on the one hand， and transforming the ecological structure on the other hand， introducing and centering new participants and maintaining and marginalizing the original ones. When environmental changes threaten the peripheral elements of the business model and ecological participants are tightly embedded in the ecosystem， the companies tend to adopt exploitative BMI， keeping the original value proposition and value creation basically unchanged， using digital technology to change value delivery and value capture on the one hand， and strengthening the structure of ecological participants on the other hand， introducing and marginalizing new participants and maintaining and centralizing the original participants. By comparing the exploratory and exploitative BMI processes， it summarizes the dominant logic behind different BMI processes， and the resulting theoretical framework has implications for BMI in retail and even other platform companies.