Organizational buyers’ assimilation of B2B platforms: Effects of IT-enabled service functionality

This paper investigates service functionality in the domain of B2B platform assimilation from the buyer’s perspective. Using a customer service life cycle framework, we identified five dimensions of service functionality, namely, information search, negotiation, acquisition, ownership, and retirement. We theorize that the importance of these dimensions is contingent upon current level of B2B platform assimilation. Furthermore, building on an enabler-inhibitor perspective, we theorize that the benefits and top management support are the enablers, whereas assimilation costs, managerial complexity, and demand uncertainty are the inhibitors of a firm’s future decision to assimilate a B2B platform. Using a two-staged field survey, we tested our theory on a sample of 191 professionals. The results indicate that the importance of service functionality dimensions varies depending on the current level of service assimilation, namely, the importance of information search functionalities decreases while the importance of ownership and retirement functionalities increases as the firms move from the awareness stage to the general deployment stage. Furthermore, our results indicate that benefits and top management support enable future platform assimilation irrespective of the assimilation stage a firm is in currently. Assimilation costs were found to have negative impact on future platform assimilation among the companies who had a low level of current assimilation. However, the effect became non-significant for the companies with a higher level of current assimilation. Our paper contributes to the theory development by (i) showing that the importance of different IT mediated services is contingent upon current level of assimilation; and (ii) showing which factors retain their importance throughout the assimilation stages. We describe management implications for B2B platform owners and buyer organizations.