Determinants of suppliers' level of use of B2B e‐marketplaces

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of various factors on suppliers' level of use of business‐to‐business (B2B) e‐marketplaces by examining three basic variable domains; suppliers' internal environment, their external environment and the characteristics of the adopted B2B e‐marketplace. Design/methodology/approach A conceptual framework is developed based on extended literature review and examined on data collected from 87 suppliers that currently use Greek B2B e‐marketplaces. Factor analysis and multiple discriminant analysis are applied to test the framework and its related hypotheses. Findings Several hypotheses are formulated leading to the development of the proposed “B2B e‐MarkFLU” conceptual framework. The research results show that factors from all the examined variable domains influence suppliers' level of use of B2B e‐marketplaces. However, the B2B e‐marketplace's characteristics are regarded as the most important of the three categories because of its higher impact on the involved suppliers, whereas the factors from the external environment have the lowest impact. Originality/value The research helps to fill an existing gap in the study of B2B e‐marketplaces' post‐adoption stage, as there have been extremely limited empirical studies after their adoption phase. To our knowledge, this paper comprises the first empirical attempt aimed to investigate thoroughly the three aforementioned variable domains by researching suppliers' active participation in B2B e‐marketplaces.