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COMP5004
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Business to Consumer (B2C) Business Model

    A business model that primarily depends on transactions along traditional lines (i.e. retailer to consumer).  The place where the Internet and eCommerce offers significant gains is in the de-regionalization of the marketing message.  The major challenge facing incumbents is fulfilling and finalizing transactions with the very clients that the model enables - customers far remote from the merchant.

Business to Business (B2B) Business Model

    A business model that primarily depends on transactions along traditional lines (i.e. supplier to distributor).  The place where the Internet and eCommerce offer significant gains is in the speed of processing and reduced transaction costs resulting from Internet-based messaging systems (primarily electronic mail).  The major challenge facing incumbents is linguistic barriers, time zone differences and dealing with the increasing disparity between the pace of communication and the pace of logistics - the rate of moving goods from A to B has hardly changed, whereas messaging is several thousand times faster than it was even a half-decade ago.

Consumer to Business (C2B) Business Model

    A business model that primarily depends on a new business dynamic introduced by the Internet.  This model mostly deals with non-tangible, highly portable goods such as digital data and knowledge.  In contrast to the more traditional view of industry (in particular the primary/secondary/tertiary business models defined immediately after the Industrial Revolution), the C2B model relies on a resource that is infinite yet highly perishable, knowledge.  Businesses in this space typically offer specialized, abstract "goods" as Graphic Art Services, Computer Services, Engineering Services and so on.  In fact there are a multitude of professional and semi-professional service organizations playing in this space (incidentally, instructional services are a prime example).  Some examples of companies that inhabit this space are:

Consumer to Consumer (C2C) Business Model

    A business model that primarily depends on a new business dynamic introduced by the Internet.  This model mostly deals with what is traditionally termed the secondary market - that for pre-owned, brokered or used goods.  Traditionally, this market was constrained to the geography of any particular advertising medium - the local newspaper being that with the lowest listing cost and greatest reach.  For most C2C players in pre-Internet times, print was the only alternative and an expensive one at that.  With the advent of cheap advertising capacity (in the form of HTML-based websites) the cost of listing a particular item dropped dramatically, enabling successful C2C entrepreneurs to make a living by leveraging the cost efficiencies introduced by the Internet, particularly that of electronic mail and the World Wide Web (WWW).  The most successful stories of so called "pure-play" Internet companies often touch on this industry, here are some Internet companies supporting this segment by acting as a nexus for consumers: