What is C2C e-commerce?

What is C2C e-commerce?
Consumer-to-consumer e-commerce or C2C is simply commerce between private
individuals or consumers.
This type of e-commerce is characterized by the growth of electronic marketplaces
and online auctions, particularly in vertical industries where firms/businesses can
bid for what they want from among multiple suppliers.16 It perhaps has the greatest
potential for developing new markets.
This type of e-commerce comes in at least three forms:
● auctions facilitated at a portal, such as eBay, which allows online real-time bidding
on items being sold in the Web;
● peer-to-peer systems, such as the Napster model (a protocol for sharing files
between users used by chat forums similar to IRC) and other file exchange and
later money exchange models; and

● classified ads at portal sites such as Excite Classifieds and eWanted (an interactive,
online marketplace where buyers and sellers can negotiate and which
features “Buyer Leads & Want Ads”).
Consumer-to-business (C2B) transactions involve reverse auctions, which empower
the consumer to drive transactions. A concrete example of this when competing
airlines gives a traveler best travel and ticket offers in response to the traveler’s
post that she wants to fly from New York to San Francisco.
There is little information on the relative size of global C2C e-commerce. However,
C2C figures of popular C2C sites such as eBay and Napster indicate that this market
is quite large. These sites produce millions of dollars in sales every day.