E-commerce

5th august 2009
There are three types of E-Commerce.

1. B2C - business to consumer.
Its origins can be traced to online retailing (or e-tailing). Thus, the more common B2C business models are the online retailing companies such as Amazon.com, Drugstore.com, Beyond.com, Barnes and Noble and ToysRus. Other B2C examples involving information goods are E-Trade and Travelocity. The more common applications of this type of e-commerce are in the areas of purchasing products and information, and personal finance management, which pertains to the management of personal investments and finances with the use of online banking tools. B2C e-commerce also reduces market entry barriers since the cost of putting up and maintaining a Web site is much cheaper than installing a “brick-and-mortar” structure for a firm. In the case of information goods, B2C e-commerce is even more attractive because it saves firms from factoring in the additional cost of a physical distribution network. Moreover, for countries with a growing and robust Internet population, delivering information goods becomes increasingly feasible.

2. C2C - Consumer-to-consumer
C2C is simply commerce between private individuals or consumers. This type of e-commerce is characterized by the growth of electronic marketplaces and online auctions, particularly in vertical industries where firms/businesses can bid for what they want from among multiple suppliers.16 It perhaps has the greatest potential for developing new markets.
This type of e-commerce comes in at least three forms:
(i) auctions facilitated at a portal, such as eBay, which allows online real-time bidding on items being sold in the Web;
(ii) peer-to-peer systems, such as the Napster model (a protocol for sharing files between users used by chat forums similar to IRC) and other file exchange and later money exchange models; and
(iii) classified ads at portal sites such as Excite Classifieds and eWanted (an interactive, online marketplace where buyers and sellers can negotiate and which features “Buyer Leads & Want Ads”).

3. B2B - e-commerce between companies.
This is the type of e-commerce that deals with relationships between and among businesses. About 80% of e-commerce is of this type, and most experts predict that B2B e-commerce will continue to grow faster than the B2C segment. The B2B market has two primary components: e-frastructure and e-markets. Efrastructure is the architecture of B2B, primarily consisting of the following:
(i) logistics - transportation, warehousing and distribution (e.g., Procter and Gamble);
(ii) application service providers - deployment, hosting and management of packaged software from a central facility (e.g., Oracle and Linkshare);
(iii) outsourcing of functions in the process of e-commerce, such as Web-hosting, security and customer care solutions (e.g., outsourcing providers such as eShare, NetSales, iXL Enterprises and Universal Access);
(iv) auction solutions software for the operation and maintenance of real-time auctions in the Internet (e.g., Moai Technologies and OpenSite Technologies);
(v) content management software for the facilitation of Web site content management and delivery (e.g., Interwoven and ProcureNet); and
(vi) Web-based commerce enablers (e.g., Commerce One, a browser-based, XML-enabled purchasing automation software).
E-markets are simply defined as Web sites where buyers and sellers interact with each other and conduct transactions.
The more common B2B examples and best practice models are IBM, Hewlett Packard (HP), Cisco and Dell. Cisco, for instance, receives over 90% of its product orders over the Internet. Most B2B applications are in the areas of supplier management (especially purchase order processing), inventory management (i.e., managing order-ship-bill cycles), distribution management (especially in the transmission of shipping documents), channel management (i.e., information dissemination on changes in operational conditions), and payment management (e.g., electronic payment systems or EPS).