Q.A stationery manufacturer in Nashik wants to start selling its notebooks and pens directly to individual households across Maharashtra through a mobile app, instead of only supplying wholesalers as it currently does. It is also considering letting other small stationery manufacturers list and sell their own products on the same app for a small commission.

Two different relationships are described here — the manufacturer selling its own goods straight to individual households, and the manufacturer's own platform hosting sales between other businesses and their customers — which map to two different e-commerce models.

The case describes two related but distinct situations, and each needs to be classified by who is actually on each side of the sale.

1. When the Nashik manufacturer sells its own notebooks and pens directly to individual households, the seller is a business and the buyer is an individual final consumer — this is a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) transaction, the same model used by most familiar online retail shopping.
2. When other small stationery manufacturers list and sell their own products through the same app, each of those transactions is still, from the perspective of the actual sale, a business (the listing manufacturer) selling to an individual consumer — so it remains a B2C transaction as well. What has changed is only that the original manufacturer's app is now also acting as a shared marketplace/platform hosting multiple sellers' B2C transactions, rather than selling only its own goods — the app itself is providing a technology and marketplace service to the other manufacturers, but the underlying sale to the end household customer is still B2C in each case. It is worth noting that if the app instead allowed individual households to resell used stationery to each other, that separate activity would be a C2C transaction — the case as described, however, only involves other businesses (manufacturers) selling to consumers, so B2C applies throughout.
   ✓Final answer

   (a) B2C — the manufacturer (a business) sells directly to individual households (consumers). (b) B2C as well — every participating manufacturer is still a business selling to individual consumers; the app is simply acting as a shared marketplace platform for multiple such B2C transactions.

Students sometimes assume that because multiple sellers use one shared platform, this must automatically be a different model (such as C2C) — the model is decided by who the buyer and seller actually are in each individual transaction, not by how many sellers share the same app/website.