Article at a glance:

A performance index for B2B marketplaces

Not long ago, business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce was regarded as the Internet sector with the greatest potential for growth and profits. Yet many once-promising B2B exchanges have now gone out of business, downsized, or changed their business model. What does the future hold for B2B? McKinsey and the Center for Electronic Business and Commerce at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business recently teamed up to collect and analyze operational information from 60 independent B2B platforms across the United States and Europe. The team's goal was to create a performance index that would measure the ability of B2Bs to acquire customers, to capture customer spending, and to profit from the business opportunities those B2Bs had targeted. This exhibit-based article presents the study's findings.

The take-away