Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

B2C vs. B2B

B2C, or business-to-consumer e-commerce, is the selling of products or services to individual consumers over the Internet. B2B, or business-to-business e-commerce, is the selling of products or services to other businesses over the Internet. Since both types of business are e-commerce, ostensibly they should operate similarly; however, there is a significant difference in the supply chains of the two types of businesses. The fundamental distinction between the B2B and B2C supply chains is in their handling of fulfillment.

Fulfillment is a bulwark of customer satisfaction in e-commerce, particularly in B2C. A customer who orders a book from Amazon.com tonight expects to receive shipment of it within a few days. He likely neither knows nor cares to know how the book will get to him, but his satisfaction and repeat business are predicated on the convenience of the ordering process and the speed and accuracy of its fulfillment. Toys ôRö Us had a fulfillment problem in 1999 that caused some of their Christmas orders to be delivered late, and since then companies have spent billions of dollars improving their logistical systems to ensure on-time delivery (Patton).

Supply chain and logistical technologies have changed so radically, in fact, that they bear little resemblance to those of even the recent past. New ways of fulfilling orders incorporate virtual warehousing, point-to-point on-demand delivery, cross-docking, and other rapid shipment techniques combine with innovative customer service solutions to produce a fulfillment environment that is extremely efficient, highly responsive, and capable of filling small orders as easily as large ones. The old delivery hierarchy where a product when from the distributor to the wholesaler, then the retailer before being shipped to the consumer is obsolete in most B2C venues (Singh). The new paradigm is integrated fulfillment, ôan e-fulfillment approach with a broad end-to-end sup...

Page 1 of 5 Next >

More on B2C vs. B2B...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
B2C vs. B2B. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 13:56, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1712715.html