Chapter 9

       Chapter 9 is about e-commerce. It was the content of this chapter that I felt most familiar with, and I suspect that will be the case for most of the class. Everybody shops online these days, so everyone has some experience with e-commerce. There are companies that carry out transactions exclusively online, and companies that do that and also have physical locations. A good example of the former would be Amazon, as there are no brick-and-mortar Amazon stores. Whereas Wal-Mart is an example of the latter, they have many stores all across the country, and a website where customers can purchase merchandise. I’ve worked for both types of companies and have some experience in the fulfillment of direct-to-customer orders, as well as the support for stores with physical locations. The are several different categories of e-commerce and these include B2B, B2C, C2C, and C2B. The first is business-to-business, and an example of this would be a company purchasing supplies from a supplier like ULINE. Next, we have business-to-consumer, and this is probably the category that most people are familiar with. An example of business-to-consumer would be a person ordering something from Amazon. Then, there is consumer-to-consumer, and this could include transactions over Craigslist between two people. Finally, we have consumer-to-business, and this could include a person selling their car to a dealership. One thing about this chapter that resonated with me is the idea that the most successful online retailers have a high value-to-weight ratio on the goods they sell. So, what this means is that they can make more money by saving warehouse space and shipping costs compared to dealing in low value-to-weight goods.

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