About E-Commerce

E-commerce:

E-Commerce is the buying and selling of products and services via the internet. It is short for electronic commerce.

E-commerce can be classified into :

B2B: Business to Business – This involves buying and selling of products between 2 businesses.

An example would be Alibaba.com which sells products in bulk. Another example would be TCS, which provides services to small medium and large businesses all over the world. In this case, the final consumer is neither of the 2 businesses. The customer utilizes the services or products of the seller to retail to the consumer in case of a product or to make its business more efficient in case of a service.

 B2C: Business to Consumer – This involves the buying or selling of products between a retailer and the final consumer.

 An example would be flipkart.com in case of products or makemytrip.com in case of services. The consumer buys from these e commerce sites as per his needs and is the final destination for the product or service.

C2C: Consumer to consumer – This involves the buying or selling of goods or services between 2 consumers. They are mostly resellers .

Examples would include olx.in or quickr.in or ebay.in. Here a consumer who has already bought a product for consumption resells it either new or after using it (second-hand). The difference between B2C and C2C is that the seller in case of C2C is not a licensed retailer. The retailer sends the good to the first consumer and the first consumer sells it to the second consumer.

Size of Global Industry

There were an estimated 2 billion user in 2011 and this number was set to grow to 3 billion by 2015. These figures point towards the role e-commerce would have to play in the time to come. The B2B e-commerce industry alone generated around $400 billion to $600 billion in 2010 which is set to grow to between $700bn and $950bn by 2015.