Consumer-to-business (C2B)

Consumer-to-business (C2B) is an electronic commerce business model in which consumers (individuals) offer products and services to companies and the companies pay them. This business model is a complete reversal of traditional business model where companies offer goods and services to consumers (business-to-consumer = B2C). We can see this example in blogs or internet forums where the author offers a link back to an online business facilitating the purchase of some product (like a book on Amazon.com), and the author might receive affiliate revenue from a successful sale.

This kind of economic relationship is qualified as an inverted business type. The advent of the C2B scheme is due to major changes:

    * Connecting a large group of people to a bidirectional network has made this sort of commercial relationship possible. The large traditional media outlets are one direction relationship whereas the internet is bidirectional one.
    * Decreased cost of technology : Individuals now have access to technologies that were once only available to large companies ( digital printing and acquisition technology, high performance computer, powerful software)

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C)

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) (or citizen-to-citizen) electronic commerce involves the electronically-facilitated transactions between consumers through some third party. A common example is the online auction, in which a consumer posts an item for sale and other consumers bid to purchase it; the third party generally charges a flat fee or commission. The sites are only intermediaries, just there to match consumers. They do not have to check quality of the products being offered.

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketing is the creation of a product or service with the specific promotional strategy being for consumers to share that product or service with others as brand advocates based on the value of the product. The investment into concepting and developing a top of the line product or service that consumers are actively looking for is equatable to a Business-to-consumer (B2C) pre launch product awareness marketing spend.