B2B, B2C, platforms, self-operation and brand building

Begin by placing B2C. B2C sells goods or services to end consumers, also called retail ecommerce. The textbook's Figure 2-3 puts B2C at about 18% of global retail in 2022, while Table 2-1 shows China's B2C online retail at about US$1.414 trillion in 2020, ranking first. Keep the scopes apart: 18% is a retail share, China-first is a B2C comparison, and neither is the B2B comparison where the US leads.

The textbook then lists five B2C operating forms in §2.2.4. Direct sellers buy or make goods and sell them to consumers. Online intermediaries do not own the goods; they match buyers and sellers and earn commission. Advertising-based B2C uses free content to gather traffic and sells advertising. Community-based B2C builds on shared-interest communities. Live-broadcasting B2C, born in China, combines demonstration and selling in real time. The list describes how a firm operates, not what it sells.

These forms overlap in practice. A short-video platform can run a community, sell advertising, host third-party shops and stream live commerce on the same day. A brand's flagship store may be a direct seller while the platform around it earns ads and commission. The analytical task is not to force a store into one box but to identify which forms are present and which one drives revenue.

Ownership is the next distinction, and it is the clearest test. A platform provides marketplace space and rules; it does not own the goods (Taobao). A self-operated retailer buys and resells; it owns inventory, sets price and carries after-sales (SheIn). A hybrid does both: JD sells self-operated items and hosts third-party sellers, and Amazon combines its own retail with a marketplace. Ownership determines who carries inventory risk, who earns trading margin and who answers a return.

Brand and tool are often confused. Brand building means selling under your own brand and owning the customer relationship; this is the core of DTC. Shopify is a site-building service: it sells software, templates and infrastructure, and earns subscription and service fees. It does not own the goods, the brand or the customer list. SheIn, by contrast, designs, sources and sells under its own brand. A store built on Shopify can be a real brand, but the software is not the brand.

Now the dimension problem. B2B/B2C/C2C classify the parties. Platform/self-operated classify ownership. Comprehensive/vertical classify category breadth. Mobile classifies the device; social, local and live classify the scene; export/import classify the flow. These are different questions, and one transaction can carry several answers at once. Buying a T-shirt from a self-operated brand's livestream on a phone is B2C, mobile, social, live and self-operated - five labels, no contradiction.

Mixing dimensions produces pseudo-questions. "Is mobile ecommerce bigger than ecommerce?" compares a device with a whole; the answer is neither yes nor no, because one is a subset of the other. "Is social commerce replacing B2C?" compares a scene with a party relationship. Once the dimensions are separated, the questions become answerable: how much B2C retail happens on mobile, or how much social-scene commerce is B2C.

C2C deserves a short note. In C2C, consumers sell to consumers: eBay auctions, Poshmark (which charges about 20% commission per the textbook) and Mercari. The textbook also notes that eBay, born as C2C, later required individual sellers to provide business information, moving toward B2C. Classification is descriptive; firms evolve, and a label that fitted yesterday may not fit today.

A practical routine follows. For any store, ask: who buys, who sells, who owns the channel, how broad is the assortment, which device and scene are used, and which direction do goods flow? Then ask who owns the goods, the brand, the traffic and the after-sales obligation. These answers explain the revenue model better than the store's design or its slogan.