Information And Communication Technology: Business-To-Consumer Analysis

The advancement of information and communication technologies (ICT) has brought dramatic change to our lives over the years. Many elements of our lives have been digitized and more and more items go electronic, which make our learning, Interactions with people and even business become more efficient, especially with the advent of Internet. Traditional brick-and-mortal stores are no longer necessary places for us to buy or sell items. Anyone who possesses a desktop, laptop, tablet or even smart phone, with the availability of internet, is now able to do distance buying and selling anywhere and anytime (“E-commerce, Omni-channel retail, and EU policy”, 2014).

This trend of business, is generally called as Electronic Commerce, or ‘E-commerce’.

Consumers are now able to purchase variety of products and services without any geographical constraints (Yuthayotin, 2014) . According to Cohn (2015), B2C has a shorter decision-making process, smaller number of involved stakeholders (usually one or two) compared to B2B. He also stated that the relationship or interaction between merchants and consumers in B2C are shorter than B2B due to one-off transactions. Statista (2016) indicates that B2C e-commerce sales worldwide generated US$1.67 trillion in 2015, and is estimated to grow to US$3.02 trillion approximately in 2018. Generally, China and Indonesia are ranked as the top two countries with the highest online retail growth rates per year.

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C)

C2C provides an online platform for consumers to transact products or service directly with other consumers (Fernandes, 2014). Both buyers and sellers can enjoy minimal costs and higher profits through C2C model (Hom, 2013). C2C is usually operated by third party sites, such as EBay and Amazon.com (Kokemuller, 2016), to secure payment and ensure products or services are well delivered (Dan, 2014).

E-commerce and Cultural

They found that there is a variation in cultural values depicted in the B2C websites for both countries. Websites from a developed country, Australia, have the combination of individualist and collectivist traits. The websites are found to offer more newsletter and blog features. On the other hand, websites from a developing country in the study, namely Pakistan, depicts high collectivism, which most of the websites focus more on group discussion features, forum and online help system. The authors pointed out that B2C websites not only have to fulfill basic functional requirement, cultural factors should be taken into consideration as well to increase sales from local online