C2C (Consumer to Consumer)

Drive through a typical suburban neighborhood on a sunny weekend day and you are bound to pass a garage sale or two, where homeowners have put used items that they no longer want in their yard and driveway so that other people can purchase them. Th e people running the garage sale aren’t doing so as a profi t-generating business. They are not turning their yard into a retail center in order to sell new products that they have bought at wholesale and marked up for profit. They are consumers who have bought products and are now selling them to other consumers.
The sellers benefi t from making a few bucks on products they no longer want, and the buyers benefi t from paying lower prices, rather than retail prices which include a mark-up.

Garage sales are examples of C2C (consumer to consumer) marketing. C2C involves a consumer marketing and selling products and services directly to other consumers. Th e Web has its share of C2C specific sites, and they are growing in popularity due to their potential for cost-savings and the near limitless selection of products and services available.

eBay.com is one of the most well known C2C sites. eBay users auction everything including used socks, houses, CDs, and corn fl akes shaped like certain U.S. states. eBay takes a small commission for each sale and charges fees to make auctions more obvious, but beyond that there is little mark-up attached to products and services. Items are sold at the going rate. Because eBay is an auction site, products and services are sold to the highest bidder.

Another popular example is Cragslist.com, which provides Web-based classifi ed ads. Users visiting Craigslist can open a section specifi cally targeted to their geographic area and search through posts generated by other users for products to buy, rooms to rent, small services off ered, and any one of a number of different classifi ed categories. For the most part, posting ads is free (in some cities, Craigslist charges companies a nominal fee to post job off erings), so that consumers can easily connect with other users.

Th e drawback of C2C Web sites is that they rely in large part on the trust factor. Th ere is no brand or reputation to count on and no customer service number to call. If you buy something from someone on Craigslist, for example, there is no guarantee you are going to get what you paid for, and there is very little retribution if the transaction goes awry.