Business-to-Consumer

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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
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.