Business-to-Consumer

What Does Business-to-Consumer Mean?

Business-to-consumer (B2C) is an Internet and electronic commerce (e-commerce) model that denotes a financial transaction or online sale between a business and consumer. B2C involves a service or product exchange from a business to a consumer, whereby merchants sell products to consumers.

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B2C is also known as business-to-customer (B2C).

Techopedia Explains Business-to-Consumer

A business that sells online merchandise to individual consumers is categorized B2C. Experts have suggested that online B2C activities played a vital role in shaping the Internet, despite the dotcom bubble burst in the late 1990s. While many online B2C business websites shut down at that time, an electronic customer surge occurred shortly thereafter, which helped catapult e-commerce activities. Companies took advantage of this by creating electronic storefronts after discovering they could sell larger volumes of merchandise through B2C models.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…