What is B2C (Business to Consumer)? B2C (Business to Consumer) Review

B2C (Business to Consumer) refers to a model of e-commerce, and is also a commercial retail model that sells products and services directly to consumers.

B2C website components

A B2C e-commerce website consists of three basic parts:

1. Shopping mall websites that provide customers with online shopping venues;

2. A distribution system responsible for delivering the goods purchased by customers;

3. Bank and authentication systems responsible for confirming customer identity and settling payment.

B2C Website Features

The most important functions of a good B2C website, which are also relatively common functions, mainly include the following aspects from the perspective of use:

1. Product display: Tell users what this website mainly sells and how much it costs;

2. Product search: Allow users to quickly find what they are interested in;

3. Add and view shopping cart: tell users what you have selected;

4. Delivery method: Tell users how to get the goods;

5. Order settlement and payment: Tell the user how much to pay and how to pay;

6. Register and log in: obtain valid user information;

7. Customer center: tell users what they have bought;

8. Related pages such as help, rules, and contact information are displayed.

I want to emphasize this! Many people don't pay much attention to it. The reason why simple pages such as help, rules, and contact information that are only related to display are also regarded as core functions is because these pages reflect the customer service level of a website and the degree of respect for users. Copying other people's help and purchase rules without even deleting their names will only make people laugh and hate. Even very tolerant users will doubt the professionalism of the website.

Let's look at the core functions of a B2C website from the perspective of internal logic. It should include the following logic: 1. Display logic; 2. Product category logic; 3. Navigation logic; 4. Search logic; 5. Shopping cart logic; 6. Logistics and freight logic; 7. Order settlement logic; 8. Payment logic; 9. User registration logic; 10. User authority logic; 11. Order tracking logic; 12. Promotion logic, etc.

In addition, functions such as voting, auctions, recommendations, points, etc. should all be optional subsidiary logic.

Industry development characteristics

1. The government strengthens the injection of guided investment to solve the problem of insufficient funds

In 2008, the government strengthened the guided investment in the field of e-commerce to improve the investment environment of the domestic e-commerce industry. The government introduced a large amount of funds into the development of e-commerce through policies such as returning investment income to social investors and supporting social investment to repurchase government-held shares. At the end of 2008, "Zhengjia.com", which was built based on the "Modern Service Industry Interactive Support Platform", a key project of the "Eleventh Five-Year Plan" National Science and Technology Support Plan, was officially opened in Guangzhou, which fully demonstrated that the country's support for the development of e-commerce has reached a new height and the funding problem of the industry development has been gradually alleviated.

2. Enterprises and governments work together to improve the e-commerce support system

In terms of e-commerce support system construction, the payment system has a certain development foundation. Online payment service providers such as Alipay and Tenpay have certain competitive advantages. At the same time, in order to further improve the development environment of the online payment industry and continue to expand the industry share, enterprises have the initiative to cooperate with the government or financial institutions to improve the payment system. Among them, improving the online payment credit system has become the main theme in 2008. On January 17, 2008, the third-party payment platform Alipay and China Construction Bank jointly launched the Alipay seller credit service. Taobao sellers who meet the credit requirements will be able to obtain personal micro-credit of up to 100,000 yuan. This credit model was launched for the first time in China, which greatly strengthened the reputation guarantee of third-party payment companies.

3. Integration and construction of government-led logistics e-commerce service platform

Unlike enterprises actively building online payment systems, the improvement of logistics systems requires strong government promotion. By integrating logistics resources across the province and even the country, establishing a logistics public information platform has become a top priority for a period of time. At present, China already has a number of municipal logistics platforms such as the Domestic Logistics Trading Center and Xiamen Logistics Public Information Platform, but they all need to be further improved in terms of information quality, functional services, etc. Against this background, in 2008, the state listed the Suzhou Industrial Park Comprehensive Bonded Zone Modern Logistics Public Information Platform as a national regional modern logistics public information platform construction pilot, using policy advantages and hardware construction and software service advantages to build a domestic and international electronic product trading base.

4. E-commerce remains attractive for investment, and B2C becomes the new favorite of venture capital

In 2008, the domestic e-commerce industry, in addition to its achievements in expanding funding sources and building a supporting system, inevitably had to face the impact of the global financial crisis. However, as domestic e-commerce and industry development became more extensive and in-depth, making full use of e-commerce B2C means has become an important choice for domestic industry enterprises to survive the economic winter. Therefore, in 2008, the attention paid by investment institutions to the domestic e-commerce industry increased instead of decreasing, and the B2C industry showed a rapid appreciation trend in both the number of investment cases and the amount of investment. A large number of traditional industry segments such as maternal and child products, IT digital products, jewelry, and building materials began to enter the B2C industry and received continuous attention from VCs. During the year, Vancl and Macalline received capital injections of US$20 million and US$80 million respectively. It can be seen that B2C has become an important segment industry that promotes the development of the domestic e-commerce industry.

Looking ahead, the domestic e-commerce industry will play an increasingly important role in the development of the national economy. It is estimated that the industry scale will reach 682.74 billion yuan in 2011. From the perspective of the industry structure, the B2B industry accounts for 89.3% of the overall industry, the B2C proportion has increased significantly to 7.3%, and the C2C industry transaction volume has reached 3.4%. According to the data of the "China B2C Market Quarterly Monitoring in the Fourth Quarter of 2012" released by EnfoDesk, the transaction scale of 3C products in the Chinese B2C market in 2012 reached 150.87 billion yuan, an increase of 95.9% over 2011, accounting for 31.5% of the total transaction volume.

5. B2B still has development potential, and B2C will accelerate growth

From the perspective of the development of the overall industry and sub-industries, the domestic e-commerce transaction volume will reach 3427.8 billion yuan in 2009, with a growth rate of more than 40%. In the next 10 years, 70% of the domestic trade volume will be completed through electronic transactions. The domestic B2B e-commerce industry has great growth potential in terms of transaction scale. In addition, as e-commerce will penetrate deeper into the industry and the B2C industry will become more attractive to investors, the share of the B2C industry will show a clear expansion trend in 2009. Among them, the B2C industry in the fields of IT digital and home building materials will become the hot areas for the development of the domestic e-commerce industry in the next few years.

In just two months, "Dangdang Home Furnishing Flagship Store" has launched multiple promotional activities, with a monthly sales growth rate of more than 333%, and may become another strategic category after books, clothing, and maternity and baby products.

6. E-commerce share in insurance, tourism, wholesale and retail industries expands

From the perspective of industry application, in view of the economic environment in 2008, the insurance awareness of the people will be further strengthened, and convenient and fast insurance e-commerce will become the first choice of insurance customers. Therefore, insurance e-commerce will continue to develop rapidly in the future; at the same time, with the slowdown in economic growth, provinces and cities will increase their attention to the tourism industry, thereby enhancing the local economic growth capacity. Under the requirement of secondary entrepreneurship in the tourism industry, tourism e-commerce will become a business that all regions will focus on developing in the future; in addition, CCID Consulting believes that the domestic national consumption capacity will not fluctuate too much in the future. When industry prices gradually increase, the low-priced products provided by the network platform will be more favored by consumers. With the improvement of netizens' online shopping, online payment and logistics services, wholesale and retail e-commerce directly facing individual consumers will face the best development opportunities.

7. Logistics platforms will gradually rise, and the payment industry will face a reshuffle

From the perspective of the construction of the e-commerce industry support system, on the one hand, the logistics public information platform will have a huge development in 2009 under the continuous promotion of the government, the platform information service capabilities will be significantly improved, and more e-commerce service providers will join the ranks of logistics system construction. On the other hand, online payment service providers will undergo a second screening in the next two years, and service providers with insufficient funds and imperfect technology, business model, credit system and other links will face the risk of being eliminated by the industry.

From the above, it is easy to see that the reason why domestic e-commerce is full of opportunities and challenges in recent years is mainly the result of the joint efforts between the government and enterprises. Domestic e-commerce is also gradually integrating with the international standards.

Development prospects

Yao Jian, director of the General Office of the Ministry of Commerce and spokesperson of the Ministry of Commerce, said that the rapid development of e-commerce and B2C online retail is expected to become a new growth point for the national economy.

Yao Jian said at the Ministry of Commerce's "E-commerce" special press conference that the application of e-commerce in my country's industrial and agricultural production, commercial circulation, tourism and community services has been continuously expanding and deepening. With the development of corporate supply chain e-commerce and international e-commerce, the development of e-commerce services will be driven and gradually become a new growth point for the national economy.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released the "2015 Information Economy Report" stating that among the world's 130 economies, small European economies are the most developed in the field of "business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce", while developing economies are catching up rapidly. China has actually become the world's largest "business-to-consumer e-commerce" market.