Strategy for Information Markets/e-commerce

Consumer-to-business (C2B) is a business model in which consumers (individuals) create value, and firms consume this value. For example, when a consumer writes reviews, or when a consumers gives a useful idea for new product development, then this individual is creating value to the firm, if the firm adopts the input. Excepted concepts are crowd sourcing and co-creation.

Another form of C2B is the electronic commerce business model, in which consumers can offer products and services to companies and the companies pay them. This business model is a complete reversal of traditional business model where companies offer goods and services to consumers (business-to-consumer = B2C). We can see this example in blogs or internet forums where the author offers a link back to an online business facilitating the purchase of some product (like a book on Amazon.com), and the author might receive affiliate revenue from a successful sale. .

This kind of economic relationship is qualified as an inverted business type. The advent of the C2B scheme is due to major changes:

• Connecting a large group of people to a bidirectional network has made this sort of commercial relationship possible. The large traditional media outlets are one direction relationship whereas the internet is bidirectional one.
• Decreased cost of technology : Individuals now have access to technologies that were once only available to large companies ( digital printing and acquisition technology, high performance computer, powerful software)