Understanding The Three Types Of E-commerce Models: B2C, B2B And P2P

The Three Types of E-commerce Models

There are three types of e-commerce models. They include: (B2C), (B2B) and (P2P).  Today ecommerce is leading in business worldwide (Wong and Ma, 2013). The different models are being used. P2P involves business between one person and another person. In this case consumers can sell goods and services to each other. This model lacks insurance. B2B involves business selling goods and services to another business. The trade involves business among enterprises. B2B has developed but it’s not so popular globally. B2B has involves three ways to be successful. They include: purchases, teamwork and service. Finally, B2C is ecommerce involving a business to customer. This is the major business model global. Most companies tend to sell products and services to final clients directly.

Business to Consumer model is the most used ecommerce model. Today most people are using B2C model. The world has more than three billion people connected to the internet. This mean that more sales are done online by business directly to the customers (Homsud and Chaveesuk, 2014). B2C will always address consumer need directly.Focusing on fashion industry. Most business tend to sell their fashion product online directly to consumers. There is a number of fashion online stores. Customers visit the sites and look for dress, bags, shoes, socks, sarees, bottom wear, accessories and many more products. There is quite a number of website where consumers can buy products. For example, BNKR, Greats, Zalando and many more.

For our discussion, we are going to consider BNKR and Greats. Both are USA based fashion store. They use B2C model in the ecommerce. BNKR is among the leading fashion stores in delivering fashion products in USA (Us.fashionbunker.com, 2018). BNKR is also an online retailer in Australia. Due to ecommerce, BNKR is now a global company. It offers shipping to 50 states in USA. BNKR, also makes a premium Australian fashion accessible to the US and hundreds of locations worldwide. The BNKR homepage URL is https://us.fashionbunker.com. Below is screenshot for the homepage. 

Greats is the other fashion online store based in Brooklyn in USA. The company specializes with men and women footwear (Greats, 2018). It provides high quality footwear to direct consumers at a great price. The company sells most footwear brands within 90 days. The website URL is: https://www.greats.com. Below is a screen shot for the home page.

BNKR applies business to consumer (B2C) model due to some visible factors. The company provides the fashion products directly to the consumers. Any potential consumer visits the site and searches for a product he/she may like. There are a variety of products in offered on the website. The products include: clothing, accessories, labels, shoes and many more items. The website belong to the B2C model due to some characteristics (Rahman and Mannan, 2018). First, there is a shorter decision-making process. Potential customers can easily desire most of the products from the website. This may result to customers instantly buying the products. Also the website tends to target a large number of customers. Secondly, the website has shorter relationship with the customers. This is because, there are buyer who do not return to the online store to buy more goods.

BNKR and Greats: Industry Example

Great online store also belong to the B2C model due to some factors considered. First, the company owners declares that the business in mainly to provide the footwear directly to consumers. Secondly, the business is product driven. Greats also tends to maximize on the value of the transaction (Tian, Liu and Chen, 2015). The marketing transactions ate shorter. Also, the need to capture any consumer’s interest via the social media platforms is immediate. The campaigns ma also include special deals, discounts from time to time and customers may also get vouchers. Thirdly, Greats is more concerned on the brand identity which is created through imagery. The above characteristics makes both websites fit the Business to Consumer Model (Murphy, 2018).

There are a number of principle business goals for both websites (https://us.fashionbunker.com and https://www.greats.com). They include: increasing the website traffic, search engine optimization, content marketing and up-sell. Increasing the website traffic is the ultimate goal for every business. Large website traffic leads to numerous number of potential customers accessing the website. This may increase the number of sales made from the website (Katre, 2018).  Google analytics a great tool that show about the website traffic. It gives vast information which includes, the dates, the location of the visitors, the landing page, the devices used, the session and the bounce rate. Google analytics also should the source the visitors used to land the website. The tools is used to make great decision such as where to advertise more, where to put up a new branch among other decision (Zhou et al., 2013). When the website traffic in high, there are chances of increasing the sales thus more profit in the businesses. Another business goal of the website is the SEO. Both websites have optimized the SEO for Google, Yahoo and Bing (Nagar and Gandotra, 2016). Search engine optimization bring in a number of benefits to a company. First, it helps in brand building. Brand building enables customers to identify the company logo, colors and the name of the company with a positive reputation.  The brand building tends to create great trust with prospects. Secondly, search engine optimization enables the company to have a better position on the SERP (Berman and Katona, 2011). The SERP is dependent on the number on clicks one receives. The top SERP get an average of 60% of all clicks. Customers associate high ranking on SERP. The customers tend to have trust from the companies with high ranking on the SERP (Tian, Liu and Chen, 2015). Finally, search engine optimization result to more traffic to the website. More traffic leads to more sale thus increasing the business profits.

Principles of Business Goals for Websites

The third principal business goal of a website is the content marketing. Content marketing is a form of promoting the website with a minimum budget. Content marketing is preferred to paid-marketing. Content marketing involves blogging, posting, info graphics. The products on the sites should have reliable information such that a customer is able to make good decision of on the products they need to buy. For example a shoe should have information about the shoe size and the several optional colors of the same shoe model. When the information about various products in displayed the customer can comfortably choose the type of product they are comfortable with (Kwak, 2017).  Finally, the up-sell is a business goal for a website. The ecommerce store are relied on helping in the sales process. The websites are designed in a way of assisting in the sales process. It is easy for a customer to view all the products in a store from the website. In case of any questions by the customers, the website have provides a live chat platform for the customers to get instant feedbacks on their queries. The website provide 24/7 availability. This tends to increase the number of sales on the online stores.

Attribute	BNKR (https://us.fashionbunker.com)	GREATS https://www.greats.com	SCALE FOR BNKR	SCALE FOR GREATS
1	The website url has the full business name. BNKR stands for bunker. The name seems slightly different from the business name.	The website url has the business name in it. In this way one is sure that the website belongs to the business	2	5
2	Upon using some search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, AltaVista etc. by the word BNKR for the business name or ‘fashion bunker’, the first result were belong to the company. This indicates the search engine implementation is good (Bar-Yossef and Gurevich, 2011).	Upon searching for greats, the first result belong to greats company. The search engine implementation is okay.	4	4
3	The website give all the information the users could require.	The information in the website is per as the user requirements	5	5
4	The requires to acquire customers’ personal information are  appropriate	The personal information required is appropriate.	5	5
5	The website has a privacy policy that system that says that company is committed to protecting the privacy of all the customer and the site visitors. The company assures the customers that the personal information provided will only be used to provide a service and to improve the site experience for the customer.	The website has a privacy policy agreement that says that personal identifiable information and non-personal identifiable information is protected. The customers may also request the business to remove the personal identifiable information as required.	4	5
6	The company has listed the ethical standards on the website. The company assures one of refunding the clients when the client is not happy.	The company also offers refund when the consumer is not happy with the footwear	5	4
7	The company has ethical standards and terms and conditions that addresses the legal issues.	The company has terms and conditions one must be compliant with when making purchases from the website.	5	4
8	The website displays various products according to categories. It is very each to search for a particular product.	It is not easy to find a particular product except by searching the brand. The shoes are not categorized.	5	3
9	The language used based on the location the located the business is operating is okay.	The language used based on the locality of the business is appropriate.	5	5
10	The product information given is okay. But not all product such as accessories have all the information such as the length.	The products have information that the clients may require (Social media, content marketing and engagement strategies in B2C, 2018).	4	5
11	No the website has customization for the user.	The website has no customization for the user.	1	1
12	The users personalizes the experience of the users. Once the user has login into the site and orders some products, the customer can view a history of the orders made. The customer does not need to register again.	The website personalizes the user experience. The same way as the BNKR website does. Whereby, the user can view the history of the orders made previously.	5	5
13	The website offers emails support and the live chat support, which is more effective (Elmorshidy, 2013).	The website provide email support, by leaving a message (Coussement and Van den Poel, 2008).	5	4
14	Itis easy with the use of the search bar.	Use of the search bar is efficient.	5	5
15	It is easy to read information on the website.	The website information is placed appropriately and is easy to read.	5	5
16	The navigation is okay (Liu, 2013).	The website navigation is okay.	5	5
17	The website design is okay for a fashion website (Plumley, 2013).	The website design is also well done and unique.	5	5
18	The website makes life easier for users as it is easy to acquire products at the door step.	It makes the users acquire quality footwear at a good price.	5	5
19	The website is efficient.	The page loading is also efficient.	5	5
20	The website is responsive to all devices.	The website is responsive all devices: phones, tablet and laptops (Guidang, 2016).	5	5
21	The payment ranges are reasonable. The discount makes the products cheaper.	The footwear are within the expected payment ranges.	5	5
22	The delivery options for the products are okay	The delivery of the footwear is reasonable.	5	5

Both websites seems to have their operations done the right way. The ways they have display their products is quite impressing. This is the reason they are among the top-selling fashion stores in USA.  There is some contrast between the two websites. https://us.fashionbunker.com has a variety of products on the online store, whereas https://www.greats.com has specified on the foot wear only. This difference could make BNKR make more sales as it attracts more customer. BNKR is more likely to be successful due to its diversity in the products it provides (Burinskiene and Daskevic, 2014).

References

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