Types of E-Commerce Business Relationships

E-commerce has been broadly categorized into four main types: business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), consumer-to-business (C2B) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C). Apart from the four sig­nificant types, there are several other types that are making their presence felt such as business-to-employee (B2E), government-to-government (G2G), government-to-employee (G2E), government-to-business (G2B), business-to-government (B2G), government-to-citizen (G2C), and citizen-to-government (C2G). These involve transactions with the government—from procurement, filing taxes, business registrations to renewing licenses.

B2B has been one of the oldest forms of eleclronic commerce in use and is generally known as electronic data interchange. During its earlier stages, it was con­ducted on a direct electronic link between two businesses, but later on the Internet became the medium. According to several research studies, B2B e-commerce makes up the major part of all e-commerce transactions. The B2C version is used by business entities to sell products or ser­vices to end users. The C2C variant is another common type mostly used in online auctions, where individuals dis­play their items to sell and others bid for them online. The C2B is one of the growing arenas where a consumer requests a specific service from a business.

Developing a business over the Internet requires some major activities such as understanding products in demand, medium to display them, marketing them, abil­ity to attract customers, proper channel to deliver the product, various avenues of accepting payments, after-sales customer service, funding of the business, and man­aging purchases by the customers, finances, staffing, and other resources like any other business.

A business model is a unique blend of three streams that are critical to the business. These include the value stream for the business partners and the buyers, the rev­enue stream, and the logistics stream

The business of several varieties of e-commerce revolves around selling (i.e., completing sales transactions of transferring rights from seller to buyer) commodities, involves online information and online reports and often physical shipment follows. This happens through five basic components of e-commerce business: web portal, merchant account for accepting the payment, payment transaction mechanism, secure server connection, and shopping cart that allows accepting multiple orders. How­ever, business model of e-commerce varies with its type, having a very little difference among them.

Questionnaire:

• Explain about the different types of business-to-business and their relationships.