A consumer posts his project with a set budget online and within hours companies review the consumer's requirements and bid on the project. The consumer reviews the bids and selects the company that will complete the project. Elance empowers consumers around the world by providing the meeting ground and platform for such transactions
C2B is a rather peculiar Internet phenomenon. An example of C2B e-commerce could be the following. A student wants to fly from London to New York, but has only £200 ($320) in the bank to pay for this round trip. They put up an ad in an Internet C2B site, seeking airlines that are willing to offer the transatlantic round trip for £200 or less. The beauty of the Internet is that it brings together a large number of customers to create a marketplace that a number of airlines (that will have to otherwise fly with empty seats) will be interested in.
Many analysts state that C2B and C2C e-commerce will thrive in the near future. It is a challenging task, however, to construct these e-commerce systems because of their diverse nature. The existing EC construction tools, which usually focus on B2B and B2C e-commerce schemes, were designed for constructing specific e-commerce systems, making them unsuitable for developing consumer-initiated e-commerce systems. In this paper, we propose a trading model that supports C2B and C2C e-commerce through the use of digital media called “vouchers” and the trading system “VTS”. We show how the introduction of vouchers simplifies the procedures of C2B and C2C e-commerce, and show that vouchers, together with VTS, can be utilized to form a trading framework that uniformly realizes the delivery/payment phase. We demonstrate that a wide range of matching phase implementations, in which the characteristics of specific e-commerce systems such as market coordination are implemented, can be integrated into this framework. |