Business to Consumer (B2C)

Abstract

Aside from the Internet’s technical progress over the last three decades, its sociological progress has been phenomenal, becoming a prominent feature of business life as well as creating a whole new sales channel to reach consumers. As suggested in earlier chapters, the business-to-consumer market is probably the most widely reported and hyped field of e-Business. Since business-to-consumer uses the Internet together with other information and communications technologies to market, buy and sell products and services, this activity is interpreted as being electronic (or Internet) commerce. In essence this book supports the growing consensus that e-Commerce is really a subset of e-Business and describes the emergence of online retailing or ‘e-Tailing’. Business customers, as opposed to home consumers, often use similar technologies and are also included under the banner of e-Commerce when operating in this way.