Different Types of eCommerce
Business-to-Consumer - part 2



The arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) brought a new way of doing business and many of the success stories that capture the public attention are consumer-orientated. Examples are Amazon.com and Tesco's on-line ordering system.

Business-to-Consumer (B2C) systems are those where a consumer interacts directly with the supplier's system through their own computers. It is simply electronic retailing using the Web as a medium to place orders for typical consumer goods such as books, CDs and, increasingly, travel arrangements. SMEs can be involved in B2C eCommerce without actually selling goods, if the target audience for their services are end-consumers.

Welsh SMEs with much smaller budgets than Amazon and Tesco could typically use a third part electronic catalogue product, which would provide a mechanism for displaying items for sale and a secure mechanism for accepting orders and payments from customers. Although such systems would need integrating with other computer programmes being run within a business, there are many examples of initial SME B2C systems being run as stand alone systems.

There are also examples in the Opportunity Wales Web site of companies such as Trophy Miniatures and Farmyard Nurseries, who are using the WWW as a powerful marketing tool without actually selling their goods on-line. Their activities are still classified as B2C eCommerce.

B2C can also relate to receiving information such as share prices, insurance quotes, on-line newspapers, or weather forecasts. The supplier may be an existing retail outlet such as a high street store; it has been this type of business that has been successful in using eCommerce to deliver services to customers. These businesses may have been slow in gearing-up for eCommerce compared to the innovative dot.com start ups, but they usually have a sound commercial structure as well as in-depth experience of running a business - something which many dot.coms lacked, causing many to fail.