Driven by increasing global competition and commoditisation of technologies, many product-oriented firms are seeking new ways on competing. Instead of only delivering products supplemented by various kinds of relatively simple services they are repositioning their offerings as well as their relationship with their customers by offering more comprehensive services such as full maintenance contracts and business solutions. Prior literature has provided several definitions and descriptions of such offerings, as well as the reasons for going in this direction and the paths needed to undertake to become providers of such offerings. It typically implicitly or explicitly assumes that buyers are interested in such offerings, or even drive the development in this direction, since such offerings are supposed to provide more value to the buyers. There are, however, also indications that buyers are not that interested in such offerings. They may not only increase costs but also the risk of losing critical knowledge. However, there appears to be no systematic attempts to review and synthesize what has been written about this topic from the perspective of the buying firm. Thus, the aim of this paper is to review this literature and to suggest some avenues deserving further research.