Consumer to Consumer (C2C) is the business model that promotes trade between private individuals, also known as ‘Citizen-to-Citizen’. Traditional markets include business to consumer interaction, in which a customer goes to the company to buy a product or service. In customer to customer markets, the business encourages a situation where clients (customers) can offer merchandise or administrations to one another. Two executions of C2C markets are closeouts and grouped notices. The remaining three e-commerce groups are B2B (business to business), C2B (customer to business), and B2C (customer to business). With the arrival of the Internet and companies like eBay, Etsy, and Craigslist, C2C marketing has boomed in popularity.
Consumer to consumer electronic commerce includes the electronically encouraged exchanges between shoppers through some outsiders. C2C web-based business (e-commerce) is a helpful path for shoppers to purchase and sell products without getting in their vehicles and heading to a store. A typical example is an online auction where a customer posts an item for sale and other consumers bid to buy it; a flat fee or commission is usually paid by the third party. The sites are merely intermediaries, only there for customers to play. They don’t have to check the quality of the goods that they sell. C2C represents a market environment where one customer purchases goods from another customer using a third-party business or platform to facilitate the transaction.
C2C e-commerce is distinct from a business-to-business model or business-to-consumer model as consumers communicate with each other directly. However, a business does operate the net (online) platform on which C2C transactions occur. Buyers usually can shop for free, but sellers often have to pay a charge for selling their items. Consumers also play an active role in tracking scams and other objectionable content on the e-commerce pages.
The goal of a C2C is to enable these relationships, helping buyers and sellers locate one another. Customers can have the benefit of the competition for products and simply find products that will rather be difficult to locate. Often, margins may be higher for sellers than conventional pricing strategies because of the lack of retailers or wholesalers causes low costs. C2C sites are easy since a brick and mortar store doesn’t need to be visited. Sellers list their goods online, and they get customers.
The most popular examples of C2C include eBay, an online auction site, and Amazon, a website that functions as both a B2C and a C2C. Since its launch in 1995 eBay has been a success and it has always been a C2C. Anyone may sign up and start selling or purchasing, in the e-commerce boom, offering customers an early voice.
Types of Customer to Customer (C2C) Businesses:
- Craigslist is one of the top websites in the world and the leading service for classified ads. Not only does Craigslist offer a forum for buying, selling, and exchanging items, it also publishes monthly classified advertising, such as work openings and property listings. The platform is very user friendly, enabling customers to register within minutes and list an item for sale. For consumers looking to create procurement, they simply visit the ‘for sale’ category and choose a suitable subcategory (e.g. computers, furniture, books, etc.).
- Etsy helps owners of businesses to build their own website where they can sell their goods to customers. The C2C platform provides advice and tools to grow a company that varies in price according to the growth stage of a company. There’s also “Sale on Etsy” software that helps to easily handle orders, listings, and customer requests.
- eBay features two types of product listings: fixed-price items and auction items. Customers can easily purchase fixed-price goods by clicking the Buy It Now button. Auction products feature a Position Bid button to enter bids and view the current price of an offer. These products are open to bidding for a predetermined period and are announced to the highest bidder as being “sold”.
C2C has a few advantages for clients. At the point when a thing is recorded on a C2C site, a nonrefundable addition expense is charged dependent on the dealer’s initial offer on the thing. When the sale is finished, a last worth expense is charged. This fee varies usually from 1.25 percent to 5 percent of the final selling price. Services are also available for sale through some C2C programs. With a range of specialist service applications, mobile platforms have opened the C2C market.
The C2C market is projected to grow within the future due to its cost-effectiveness. The price of using third parties is declining, and therefore the number of products available by consumers is steadily rising. Many C2C sites make their money from fees or commissions that vendors are paying to list products for sale. C2C sites merely serve as intermediaries, matching buyers with sellers, and they have no influence over the quality of the goods sold. Owing to the prevalence of social media and other online platforms, retailers view this as an important business model. These channels exhibit explicit items previously claimed by shoppers and increment request, which drives expanded online traffic to C2C stages.
While online auctions allow sellers to view their items, such exhibitions often require a fee. Other times, when goods are sold websites charge a fee. The number of internet-related auction frauds has also increased with the increasing use of online auctions. C2C also has issues such as lack of quality control or promises of payment. There is little support for credit card transactions in some situations, but the proliferation over the years of PayPal and other similar payment systems has helped to simplify payments on C2C platforms.
Pioneers have found workarounds to exploit others. In the event that utilizing a C2C stage keeps an eye out for dealers that can’t respond to nitty-gritty inquiries regarding things available to be purchased. The C2C commercial center is expanding in prominence among dealers hoping to augment their business potential by interfacing with clients that they in any case would not arrive at utilizing conventional selling strategies. Most businesses believe that the use of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is C2C marketing. Nevertheless, marketing appears to be business to customers in many situations.
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