What is B2B2C ecommerce?

B2B2C ecommerce or Business To Business To Consumer is a business model that refers to a business set-up where a brand/business collaborates with multiple other brands/businesses to sell directly to the end customers. 

B2B2C combines B2B and B2C business models and enables brands to sell products or services to the end buyers by collaborating with partner businesses that are already selling to the end buyers. The B2B2C model combines the best of B2B and B2C models and enables B2B brands to understand the end customer demands better.  

How does the B2B2C business model work?

B2B2C ecommerce usually works similar to an online marketplace. A large business onboards other businesses as its sellers. The seller businesses buy and sell the products and services of the bigger business to the end customers. The end customers have trust and loyalty for the bigger B2B2C brand and not directly for the seller brands. 

In this type of business model sometimes the bigger brand does not sell the products or services directly, rather facilitates the smaller retailers to sell from their platform. For example, Urban Company does not actually sell anything rather it brings a variety of service providers on one platform. It offers them certain training, equipment etc. to improve their skills and helps them reach and service a wide clientele.

Another example of a product-based B2B2C model could be an enterprise FMCG brand that manufactures a variety of FMCG products. The FMCG brand sells its products to various retail and grocery stores. It partners with these stores to set up a hyperlocal marketplace that eventually sells grocery and other FMCG products to the end buyers.

What are the benefits of B2B2C business model?

The B2B2C model gives a better business opportunity to brands by helping them use the best of B2B and B2C features.  B2B2C ecommerce helps enterprise brands improve the brand credibility by partnering with retailers that already have a connect with the end buyers. The benefits of business to business to consumer ecommerce model are : 

• Reach a new and wider customer base easily through your partner businesses

• Boost revenue by selling to more customers 

• Onboard new businesses as partners/sellers by helping them with features/facilities given by your brand

• Offer a better chance to sell to your partner businesses

• Remove middlemen to gain earn better profit margins

• Easily scale up to new areas and product lines by partnering and onboarding new businesses

• Create more business opportunities for your partner brands

• Reduce overhead costs by using the warehousing, hyperlocal delivery solutions etc. of partner businesses 

• Gain customer loyalty by facilitating your customers with ease of shopping through multiple digital touchpoints

• Get access to customer buying and browsing behaviour patterns and other data for making strategic business decisions

What are the challenges of B2B2C business model?

While the B2B2C model offers immense growth opportunities, implementing it has also some challenges. Most of these challenges can be easily handled by partnering with the right tech solution provider for B2B2C ecommerce. 

Here is a list of key challenges of the B2B2C model: 

• Finding the right B2C brands to partner with your B2B business

• Offering ease of managing and running their business through your platform to your B2C business partners

• Finding the right technology solution that can handle the requirements of B2B and B2C business models

• Ability to make quick changes to your platform based on a new market or customer demands

• Offering customized buying experiences to different buyer segments

• Customizing pricing, discounts, shipping etc. for different B2C brands selling through your platform

• Seamless integrations with best in class software for managing multi-level operations of the business model

• Scaling the business on the product, B2C partners, customers, geographies and any other levels

What is the future of  B2B2C Ecommerce?

With the ecommerce market being dominated by customer experiences and ease of buying B2B2C business model offers a very good opportunity to businesses of every size. With the power of collaboration, combining the best of B2B and B2C and strategic marketing B2B2C brands have everything needed to disrupt the ecommerce market. 

All that is needed for a successful business to business to consumer model is a next-gen platform like StoreHippo that enables brands to streamline and simplify the business model for every party involved. From giving the complete control to the admins to setting up multiple storefronts for different products, B2C brand and locations, StoreHippo offers battle tested solutions for the B2B2C ecommerce model. The decoupled headless architecture makes it easy to make changes quickly and inherent flexibility and scalability of the StoreHippo brand enables B2B2C brands to build out-of-box solutions.