Four basic modes of e-commerce

If you plan to engage in the cross-border e-commerce industry, then these four basic models must be mastered. It is as if the roots of the tree, people and other business models are derived from these 4 models.

1. B2C - Business to Consumer

This is the most traditional business model, in which companies provide products or services directly to consumers.

As consumers, any product we buy in the company's flagship store can be said to be part of B2C. deliver

The biggest advantage or feature of this business model is that the sales cycle is short, and companies can usually spend less operating capital to sell.

Because it's direct business-to-customer, there are no intermediaries, so you can spend all your marketing budget on finding customers.

But on the other hand, it also determines that the number of customers and the average customer unit price are not easy to increase. Imagine you are a business directly facing thousands of consumers. On the other hand, agents across the country correspond to local customers. Which customer will have a larger volume? Of course it is the second case.

In the short term, the B2C model is more suitable for companies that temporarily have less ambition and less budget. At this time, if you spend a lot of budget and energy to be a regional agent, it will greatly lengthen the conversion cycle, making it difficult to maintain the company's cash flow. But through the B2C model, it is much better to reach consumers directly to form orders.

2. B2B – business to business

In fact, this model can be divided into two situations according to the final applicable person of the product.

One is that the end users of your products are C-end customers, but you are only responsible for selling these products to another B-end customer, who eventually sells them to thousands of C-end customers.

For example, if you are a gas stove manufacturer, and you don’t want to do C-end retailing by yourself, you can directly sell the finished products in bulk to some buyers and let them sell them.

On the other hand, the end user of the product is the B-end, so your customers are the B-end customers. For example, centrifuges, professional medical equipment, these things C-end consumers will not buy or use, but other companies, such as hospitals, such as testing institutions, use these products.

Of course, you can also sell this product to big distributors who eventually sell to businesses that need it, which is another story.

3. C2B - person to business

I prefer to explain the C here as an individual rather than a consumer, so that it can be better understood. deliver

This business model is that individuals provide services for enterprises, the simplest ones such as Fiverr, domestic Zhubajie and so on.

However, this model has no reference significance for most foreign trade companies, and the model has great limitations.

4. C2C - Consumer to Consumer

Consumers are directly linked to consumers, and the platforms where they exist usually only earn service fees or a share of transactions.

The simplest, the current short video personal delivery, in fact, can be understood as a C2C model, consumers directly to consumers.

But what's interesting is that I think the value of this model to enterprises is that we can make this indirect link into B2C2C.

It means that the company provides the final product, and consumers reach more consumers. Does it look more familiar? The community that most companies are doing now is actually taking advantage of this model.

However, the current community still has great limitations, or it has not fully exerted the true power of B2C2C. The current community economy can only be regarded as a transitional stage of B2C and B2C2C, including fission and new growth, or it is still led by enterprises.

B2C2C means that the enterprise only assumes the role of providing products, and the latter C2C is the spontaneous emergence of consumers, forming a perfect mechanism to allow consumers to automatically convert from consumption to the next 2C terminal, thus forming an infinite fission grid.

Recently, I have been thinking about and testing the gameplay in this area, but some theoretical things have not been sorted out, and they will be sent out in a few days.

Two innovative approaches to the underlying business model

In the field of advertising, there is a concept called Banner-blind, which in Chinese can be translated into advertising blindness. This means that if potential customers see an advertisement for a long time, they will selectively ignore it, causing the effect of the advertisement to plummet.

This concept also applies to business models. If consumers face a sales model for a long time, they will selectively ignore the temptation of this model, thereby reducing or distracting consumption. deliver

This requires us as operators to continuously innovate and optimize business models to adapt to more volatile consumers and markets.

1. D2C – Direct to Consumer

It can be understood as the development and variant of B2C, cutting out the middlemen and direct-to-consumer. However, some differences from B2C are that companies at this time do not simply sell their products, but incorporate some of the functions of middlemen into themselves.

D2C does not allow enterprises to be wholesalers directly to consumers, but instead becomes a giant platform that integrates production capacity, sales capacity, and user operation capacity.

This can effectively solve the problems of low customer unit price and user disloyalty.

2. “Subscription Services” – From Newspapers to Products

Our most intuitive understanding of subscription is that for example, if we subscribe to a newspaper, we will pay the publisher on time, and the publisher will deliver new newspapers on time.

So does this model have some reference value for companies operating physical products?

For example, if you are dealing with flowers and green plants, of course you can do relatively traditional 2C services. Customers buy whatever flowers they want from your store.

Another model is to launch a "subscription" service of 199 per month, in which flowers can be changed at any time within a month, and customers can see new flowers at home every week. At this time, the product you provide to the customer is actually a pot of flowers, but the product has become re-circulatable.

Another application of this model is the cloud farms that some companies are now engaged in. You spend some money on a piece of land every year and deliver some to you on a regular basis according to the maturity cycle of crops.

The truth is the same, and there are a lot of things to play.

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