Benchmarking business‐to‐business electronic commerce

The last decade of the twentieth century brought with it exponential growth of electronic commerce (EC). The growth of business‐to‐business (B2B) EC outpaced that of all other forms of EC. During roughly the same time period, benchmarking became an important approach for accessing organizational performance. Benchmarking is a methodology suitable for evaluating virtually any aspect of organizational performance in public or private organizations. In this manuscript B2B and benchmarking are discussed with the objective of developing directions for research and the application of B2B benchmarking. A framework for benchmarking B2B EC is proposed that describes five levels of benchmarking: independent B2B EC benchmarking, buyer‐seller (1:1) collaborative benchmarking, 1:M consortium benchmarking, 1:M:N collaborative benchmarking, and buyer‐intermediary benchmarking.