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UoL CS Notes

E-Commerce Taxonomy

COMP315 Lectures

Some businesses may use a combination of the following (such as eBay):

B2B

In B2B e-commerce, seller and buyer are both businesses. Take the following examples:

  • Office supply vendor (physical goods).
  • Cloud service provider (IT service).
  • PR management (service).

This is by far the largest market segment.

B2C

Business sells to customer:

  • Ordering food from Tesco online.
  • Amazon

C2C

Customer sells to customer, often with a business as an intermediary:

  • eBay
  • Airbnb

C2B

Customer sells to a business such as:

  • SurveyMoney (labour for money)
  • Amazon Mechanical Turk (human computation)
  • CeX (sell to a business)

This is by far the smallest segment.