Taking a page from the pro sports world and its “combine” method of rating the performance of athletes, a new report is rating B2B ecommerce technology products across 10 performance categories.

The Paradigm B2B Combine, a report from consulting firm Paradigm B2B LLC, scores more than a dozen products from 13 vendors. Unlike reports from other firms that rate the vendors of ecommerce technology, the Combine report reviews specific products, scoring each based on their performance in each category. “We analyze products, not vendors,” says Andy Hoar, CEO of Paradigm B2B and author of the report.

The vendors whose B2B ecommerce technology products the report covers are: Elastic Path, Episerver, Insite Software, Intershop, Magento Commerce (Adobe), Miva Merchant, Oracle/Oracle NetSuite, Salesforce, Sana Commerce, SAP, Unilog, WebJaguar and Znode. Hoar says each of these companies was invited to participate, and that they did not pay a fee to be included.

Going for the gold, silver and bronze

The report came out this week in two versions, the Midmarket Edition, which is designed with information for midsized ecommerce practitioners considering a purchase of B2B ecommerce technology, and the Enterprise Edition, designed for large companies with $1 billion or more in sales.

Each edition reviews and scores participating vendors on dozens of performance criteria across such categories as Content & Data Management; Transaction Management; Integrations, Operations & Infrastructure; and Total Cost of Ownership. The scores take into account market feedback that Paradigm B2B gathered from clients and technology deployment partners of each vendor, Hoar says.

For each category, the report shows which products scored the highest and earned either a gold, silver or bronze medal. It also shows each product’s strengths and weaknesses, but it does not provide a ranking to indicate which products scored the highest overall.

Targeting buyers’ interests

“The Paradigm B2B Combine is targeted directly at the interests of the ecommerce technology buyer,” Hoar says in his introduction to the report, adding: “I’m mirroring the combine process that professional sports teams use to assess the capabilities and fit of draft candidates across critical performance areas. My goal is to evaluate software vendors in key categories so that ecommerce teams can determine where and how a solution fits into their system (their culture, technology stack, partner ecosystem, etc).”

Hoar adds that the report is also designed to help technology buyers learn such things as the extent of extra help they might need from a vendor’s technology and services partners to deploy a particular ecommerce platform with the kind of features they need to interact with their customers.

Paradigm B2B is making the report available to the featured vendors for purchase, granting them reprint rights. The firm did not say publicly what it’s charging for the report.

Hoar is also the co-founder with B2BecNews publisher Vertical Web Media of B2B Next, an annual conference on B2B ec0mmerce that will be held in Chicago this fall.

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