استراتژی عملیات سرویس درباره شیشه: اثر بخش صنعت، مالکیت و ارائه خدمات بر شکست های بازار الکترونیکی B2B

This paper contributes to the emerging area of e-service strategy in the context of business-to-business (B2B) e-marketplaces, which we view as Internet-based service delivery systems that link sellers’ offerings to buyers. Although a myriad of new B2B e-marketplaces were launched over the past decade, a substantial number failed shortly after the peak of the NASDAQ in 2000. The bursting of the Internet bubble provides a setting for assessing salient, theory-based determinants of failure—and success. Accordingly, we apply a service operations strategy lens and complementary organizational theories to explain how three strategic factors—industrial sector characteristics, ownership structure, and functionality of service offering—may have influenced B2B e-marketplaces’ odds of survival after the bubble. We empirically test these factors using logistic regression analysis on a sample of 854 B2B e-marketplaces.

Over the past decade, business-to-business (B2B) e-marketplaces have captured the imagination of practitioners and scholars alike. In this research, we characterize a B2B e-marketplace as an Internet-based service delivery system that links sellers’ offerings to buyers. A myriad of these new B2B entities were launched as online platforms to facilitate commerce and trading among Internet-linked businesses (Zhu, 2004). Unfortunately, a substantial number failed with the burst of the Internet bubble (Day et al., 2003 and Laseter and Capers, 2002).

This study offers empirical support for a number of emergent ideas in B2B e-commerce research and fills an identified gap in the growing e-services operations strategy literature. We provide empirical evidence that three service strategy-related characteristics—industrial sector, ownership form, and functionality of service offering—influenced B2B e-marketplace survival 2 years after the Internet peak. Our study addresses the recent call for studies that advance e-services research. However, many more questions in this emerging area of study remain unanswered. Below, we summarize the limitations of the study, areas for future research, and the contributions of our research to theory and practice.