C2C E-commerce

We’ve all heard a lot about business to business and business to consumer sales, but what about consumer to consumer? Thanks to the age of the internet, consumer to consumer e-commerce is now a booming industry.

One of the main advantages of consumer to consumer sales compared to B2C model, for example, is that it is easy to start. Anyone can sign up to eBay or Etsy from anywhere and anytime to create a listing and start selling something.

Being easy to start, however, doesn’t make it easy to master. On the contrary, it often makes it even more difficult. There is a huge crowd that you have to stand out from, and if you don’t, you’ll be underperforming and losing out to a whole swathe of competition.

Fortunately for you, if you’re interested in starting up a consumer to consumer venture, there are useful strategies and approaches adapted from successful business strategies that can help you be more successful very quickly.

This article will help you understand the elements of the consumer to consumer e-commerce, the difficulties, and opportunities, and arm you with actionable tips and strategies to push you ahead of your competition.

Here we go!

What Is C2C E-Commerce?

What is C2C? Well, C2C is defined as any individual selling things to other individuals without the use of a business entity. Breaking this down further, there key ingredients are these:

Seller – If you’re reading this, that’s probably you.
Buyer – If you’re reading this, you’re probably looking for more of these.
Sales Platform – This can be eBay, Etsy, Amazon, or an independent E-Commerce store on your own website. There are a huge number of different platforms to choose from and each works differently in terms of commissions and charges. You’ll need one of these to advertise the products you are trying to sell.
Payment System – Depending on your platform this may well be provided as part of the service. The platform will hold the money in escrow or deliver it to your bank account for a small fee. Usually, however, this boils down to online payment, via card or PayPal, or in local circumstances, Cash On Delivery.
Delivery – If your customer is a long way away you may wish to use shipping to get the item to them, but this comes at a cost. Typically, you can save on that cost by charging the buyer, which reduces the chances of them making a purchase, or by delivering it by hand, which costs you time and effort.

C2C E-commerce Examples

If you are still confused about C2C e-commerce, think eBay, Craigslist, or Amazon.

These are platforms that enable consumers to trade with each other at any time.

The Rise And Rise of Consumer to Consumer Sales

The internet has made it easier than ever to sell things online. Starting out as a simple way to list things publicly, platforms soon developed to offer better features, including payment facilitation, image uploads, accounts, user ratings, and more.

Now, eBay, Alibaba, Amazon, and even Facebook facilitate consumer to consumer sales. eBay alone now enjoys $60 million in transactions every single month and is increasing by up to 20% month-on-month right now.

It’s easy to understand why more and more people are getting involved, and how such extreme growth figures can be made possible. There are currently 242 million online shoppers active at any given time, spending up to $40,000 a second. Every second.

This all sounds very impressive on its own, but what about in context? It’s even more impressive.

consumer to consumer ecommerce is growing and show no sign of stopping any time soon. — C2C Ecommerce is growing and shows no sign of stopping any time soon.

Three years ago, C2C E-Commerce sales were estimated to be worth $105 billion. Business to Consumer was estimated to be worth $71 billion. This means individuals without a business can enter a bigger and potentially more lucrative market than businesses. This a quiet revolution that has been building for years.

The revolution is such that businesses are even starting to incorporate the C2C model as a channel for their sales. Those that haven’t done so yet are receiving some pretty dire warnings of what will happen if they don’t.

Hopefully, this briefing has got your pulse racing, your mouth watering, and your tail wagging. In the next section, we’re going to help you get a piece of this action, and make your first foray into C2C E-Commerce as successful as possible.

Strategies for Consumer to Consumer Sales

Today, I’m writing based on the assumption that you already have a presence on an e-commerce platform, or you have your own e-commerce website.

We’re not looking at setting up here, as that’s relatively straightforward. Instead, we’re looking at optimizing everything you do after that to maximize your potential audience and optimize your conversion to sales.

1. Content Marketing

writing contents is an example of good consumer to consumer ecommerce marketing ideas — Writing content allows your eCommerce site to be discovered in additional ways. Content can also drive readers to purchase.

The Idea

Publish content regularly to build a following that can later be converted to purchasers.

How Does It Work?

It’s a proven, lucrative method of attracting audiences and ‘funneling’ them toward your product. Start with a broad topic people are looking for information on, and narrow their perspective down to your product.

This allows you to draw search traffic (called organic traffic) to your blog and products by using SEO – matching the words and phrases you use with those being searched for.

Now, what’s the secret to content marketing success? Content Intelligence.

Content Intelligence represents a set of systems and processes that transform content and business data into actionable insights for content strategy.

Which is what BiQ Cloud’s Content Intelligence is born to do.

Once you’ve entered a website to be analyzed, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of the published content.

We have come a long way on the journey to better understand what potential customers are looking for in their content. With BiQ’s Content Intelligence AI-guided optimization, you will see how’s your content is performing against the top 10 SERP content in relation to your target keyword.

The best part about this feature is that it can tell you exactly which paragraph has lesser relevance to the overall content.

Now, you will be looking at the “Edit Needed’ section to check which paragraph needs revision.

You can then dive deeper into the paragraph and analyze how to better improve its relevancy to your target keyword.

Other than that, you can also see an overview of your content performance, including readability, sentiment distribution, word count, semantic density, and keyword density.

BiQ content intelligence relevancy analysis that shows great

If you were to look at the screenshot above, having such information allows you to produce content that is both relevant and valuable to your readers. If you want to make your readers feel confident about your content, edit them, and make them feel so.

Go give BiQ’s Content Intelligence a try today and check out this post to see how you can also use BiQ to uncover your keyword gap and craft better content!

Once you’re done with this, you can proceed to share this content on social media to get social media traffic.

What’s more, you can create sign-up opportunities on your website to hook people onto an email list, which you can then market directly in the future.

Long term, all these actions serve to help you build a following and convert readers into buyers further down the line.

Setting up a blog is super easy, and you only need to be able to research topics you know will be really helpful to your potential customers. You can even outsource the writing part to ghost-writers.

Examples

Reviews – Product-specific content can help you promote your own product long term, by hooking people searching for similar items and brands. Honest, fair reviews will help build trust and credibility.
Informative Blogs – Create How to’s, Guides, and Tips and Tricks that will be useful to users of what you’re selling. You can occasionally include your products in these posts, so you drip-feed product awareness to a loyal audience. In a list of the 10 Must Have Camping Accessories, yours can be one of the ten, but readers still get plenty of other value.
Casual Blogs – Untargeted blogs offering information on everyday life and a personal journey can be a great way to appear relatable and honest. People like buying from other people, and making the products you sell part of your real story can help people see the difference they make in everyday life.