Consumer-to-Consumer

Consumer-to-consumer (or C2C) electronic commerce involves the electronically-facilitated transactions between consumers through some third party. A common example is the online auction, in which a consumer posts an item for sale and other consumers bid to purchase it; the third party generally charges a flat fee or commission. The sites are only intermediaries, just there to match consumers. They do not have to check quality of the products being offered.

Examples of C2C

• My.Dal (Dalhousie University Classifieds)
• eBay
• Craigslist
• Tiger Books
• Amazon.com
• My.Yahoo Auction
• Mightybids.com
• ubuysell.ca
• clickbuysell.com
• gbuysell.com
• eb2bs.com
• ubuysell.co.uk

This type of e-commerce is expected to increase in the future because it cuts out the costs of using another company. An example on how it could change in the future from Management Information Systems, if you are driving around in a car, someone having a garage sale can transmit to your GPS advertising their garage sale. This will reach a larger population than just signs.

For example: Garage Sale Organizer which can download garage sales into handled and modile GPS systems.

Pros and Cons of C2C

Advantages of C2C

• Paypal set up directly for this reason
• Broader market
• Eliminates intermediary
• Constantly changing, updating
• Always there so that consumers can use it whenever they want

Disadvantages of C2C

• No quality control
• No payment guarantee
• Hard to pay for using cheques, ATM cards, etc. but in the future this is likely to change.

Universities

C2C are becoming more popular amongst students in universities because these are large communities in the same geographical region that are low on money. So they are looking for deals very often and these kinds of websites offer this. Universities themselves set up places for students to sell textbooks and other stuff to other students, you can even advertise that you are subletting your apartment. An example of this from above is Tiger books and Dalhousie University Classifieds, both of these are put together by the school itself for the students.