Business & Strategy
End of the Line?
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1 Nov 2000
B2C is not dead. It’s stupid acronym, but it’s not dead.
Calling business to consumer commerce B2C and commerce between businesses B2B makes serious, trillion dollar industries sound like a slogan on a personalized license plate.
Anyone who thinks that the business of selling products and services to consumers has died needs to visit their local monument to commerce, the shopping mall. What have died are companies with unsustainable business models; the companies who thought that doing business online canceled the rules of business.
Spending $80 and up to acquire a customer who bought an average of $15 each year? Expecting customers to pay shipping costs on 50 pound bags of dog food? (Or worse, shipping them for free.)
The old joke comes to mind, "We lose money on every sale. How do we stay in business? Volume!"
The success stories of online consumer commerce have largely been those that have applied solid business sense to ideas and business models that are unique to the Internet. EBay didn’t get to the top of the heap by paying customers to sign up or losing money on every transaction.