Q.Discuss the salient aspects of B2C commerce.

Salient aspects:

• Parties: a business firm at one end and customers at the other.
• More than selling: selling is only the outcome of a wider marketing process that begins before the sale and continues after it — identifying customers, promotion, and sometimes delivery (e.g. music or films delivered online).
• Round-the-clock contact and surveys: the firm stays in touch with customers 24×7 and runs online surveys to learn who buys what and how satisfied they are, at lower cost and higher speed. …

Meaning: In B2C commerce (Business-to-Customers), business firms are at one end and customers at the other. It is the form of e-commerce that most people picture first — online shopping.

Salient aspects:

• It is much more than selling: Online 'selling' is only the outcome of the wider marketing process, which begins before a product is offered for sale and continues after it is sold. B2C therefore embraces a whole range of marketing activities, not just the sale transaction.
• The range of activities covered:
  • Identifying customers and understanding their needs;
  • Promotion of products and services;
  • and, for suitable products, even the delivery — for example, digitised products such as music or films can be delivered online. All of this is done at much lower cost but higher speed than traditional methods.
• Round-the-clock contact: e-commerce lets a firm stay in touch with its customers 24 hours a day, so customers can reach the firm at any time.
• Learning from customers: The firm can run online surveys to find out who is buying what and how satisfied they are, feeding this back into its marketing.
• Its corollary — C2B: Consumer-to-Business (C2B) is the natural counterpart of B2C, giving consumers the freedom of 'shopping at will'. Customers can use company call centres to make toll-free queries and lodge complaints round the clock at no extra cost — and such call centres may even be outsourced. …