What Does B2C Mean?
B2C is an abbreviation that means Business-to-Consumer. It refers to a market focus on consumers, as opposed to a market focus on other businesses. Essentially, a B2C company's clientele are mainly individual consumers, rather than business entities. Although Business to Community market focuses exist both online and offline, the term most commonly refers to the online variety.
For example, Wal-Mart, Target, Macy's, JCPenney, and Sears, each have a Business-to-Consumer market focus.
In the early days of ecommerce, B2C businesses had a large influence on the development of the Internet as a commercial platform. Now, B2C ecommerce sales will increase by about 20.1% and reach $1.500 trillion by the end of 2014. In North America, this type of ecommerce sales are expected to be at about $482.6 billion in just 2014 alone.
Such explosive growth is thanks in large part to the rapidly expanding online and mobile user bases, to the increase in mcommerce sales, and to the innovations made to payment and shipping options.
In other words, ecommerce is thriving now more than ever thanks to the growing amounts of people using mobile technology, to the amount of people using smartphones and other mobile devices to shop, and to the new ways users can pay and ship their products.