Definition of E-commerce
E-commerce or electronic commerce is the activity of selling and purchasing products or services in exchange of money using online platforms. This also pertains to internet commerce where the exchange of goods, services and cash happens via the internet. This technique is widely adapted by most enterprises that have a brick-and-mortar business model.
In fact, e-commerce helps the companies to survive in this time of pandemic. It is even more successful due to high demand by customers since online stores become more accessible to users. Allowing them to experience virtual shopping whenever they are. Since e-commerce became popular, numerous forms have been created.
Here are the 5 Types of E-commerce
1. Business to Consumer or B2C: This is the most common and popular form of e-commerce. It simply means that the act of selling and purchasing of goods and services are done by businesses and customers. For instance, buying high-quality clothes from online retailers or resellers.
2. Business to Business or B2B: It pertains to a particular business company offering goods or services to another business entity. Like rice producers selling goods to wholesalers and retailers. These transactions do not involve the customers or consumers since it purely consists of exchanging raw materials, ingredients, software or anything that needs to be completed.
3. Consumer to Consumer or C2C: It involves completing sales or trading commodities from a consumer to another. This is widely practiced on Facebook Marketplace, eBay, Etsy and many more. This transaction only happens between consumers without any business entities.
4. Direct to Consumer Model: This model might be the latest type of e-commerce and its rapidly changing based on the ongoing trends in the market. In this model, a particular brand or business is directly approaching consumers to offer their products or services without any middleman, retailer or distributor. This involves the consumers subscription to Netflix, use of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the like. As long as the sales are being fulfilled directly.
5. Consumer to Business or C2B: This is where consumers directly contact firms or businesses to sell their own goods or services. For example, this encompasses homeowners selling their homes to home buyers in Charleston, professional individuals offering consultation to organizations in terms of property management in Alabama, freelancing, popular social media influencers offering promotional posts to online stores and the like.
Examples of Major E-commerce Companies
1. Amazon – this is the largest online retailer company in the entire United Stated and one of the firms that urge business technology. As you can observe, they ship orders anywhere they can and most retailers, influencers and consumers obtain their products from Amazon.
2. Alibaba – is a Chinese E-commerce platform that has more affordable products and services. They have the largest business to business (B2B) market shares including the consumer to consumer (C2C) and business to consumer (B2C) market internationally. In fact, Alibaba beat Walmart and Amazon in terms of overall revenue in 2015.
3. Walmart: is also one of the competitive retailers in the United States. They offer traditional retailing, online retailing, subscriptions, grocery and delivery services to the public.