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What is E-commerce?

E-commerce i.e electronic commerce or internet commerce is nothing but the process of buying and selling of goods or services, or the transfer of money and data online i.e using the internet or electronic network. From mobile shopping to online payment, e-commerce encloses a wide variety of data, systems, and tools for both online buyers and sellers.

 

Most businesses with an e-commerce presence in short e-business use an e-commerce store and/or an e-commerce platform in order to conduct both online marketing and sales activities and to supervise plans and fulfillment.

 

E-commerce platforms are generally of two types:

1. E-commerce webstore with Single-vendor

2. E-commerce Marketplace with Multi-vendor

 

Types of E-commerce Models:

Generally, there are four main models of e-commerce where almost every transaction between takes place between consumers and businesses can be categorized into:

1. B2C

2. B2B

3. C2C

4. C2B

 

Let’s look at each type of e-commerce models in a bit more detail.

 

1. Business to Consumer (B2C):

B2C e-commerce encloses transactions made between a business and a consumer.

It refers to the sale of a good or service to an individual consumer by an individual business.

e.g: You buy shoes from an online shoe retailer.

 

This is one of the most widely used transaction models in the e-commerce context.

 

2. Business to Business (B2B):

B2B e-commerce encloses transactions made between businesses, such as a manufacturer and a wholesaler or retailer.

It refers to the sale of a good or service from one business to another business.

e.g: A business sells software-as-a-service (SaaS) for other businesses to use.

 

3. Consumer to Consumer (C2C):

C2C e-commerce business model is one of the earliest forms of e-commerce model.

It refers to the sale of goods or services between customers.

 e.g: You sell your old furniture’s on eBay or Amazon to another customer.

 

4. Consumer to Business (C2B):

When a consumer sells their own products or services to a business or organization, this kind of transaction is called C2B.

That is Individual consumers make their products or services available for business buyers.

An example of this would be a kind of business model like iStockPhoto, in which stock photos are available online for purchase directly from different photographers.

 

Shopify E-commerce Platform:

 

Shopify is “all in one” e-commerce platform which allows you to build an online store with the great user experience. It’s a fully featured hosted platform which is easy to use and quick to set up.

If you’re looking to sell products online with less experience in web development or coding, Shopify can be the e-commerce platform to achieve this.

Key features of Shopify:

• Admin/Dashboard: They provide a dashboard/admin.

• Theme Store: Shopify provides free and paid themes from the Shopify Theme Store to make your store look great.

• Product Management: In Shopify, Product Management is easy. You can easily add Images from URL, manage variations of your products like product with different sizes or colors.

• Payments methods: Shopify offers a wide range of payment methods with Shopify Payment which is Shopify's own payment provider to accept credit card payments and you can also choose Third Party Providers i.e. from over 70 credit card payment providers for your store.

• Marketing & SEO: Shopify offers built-in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features.

• Analytics: Shopify provided with built-in analytics that helps you to keep track of your website’s progress over time.

• 24/7 support: A dedicated Support team available 24/7 to answer your questions.

Shopify provides 14 days trial period, you can try to see how it works for your business. There are different monthly Shopify Pricing Plans, if the merchants located in India, you can see the details here otherwise if they located outside of India, you can click here to see details.

As Shopify is an E-commerce platform (i.e with single-vendor), you can sell your own products online.

 

You can also convert your Shopify single-vendor app into multi-vendor Marketplace by installing Multi-Vendor Marketplace plugin from Shopify app store into your Shopify app.

 

So, if you want to sell products on your own E-commerce webstore, I would like to suggest you prefer Shopify.