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Essay on Supply Chain Differences
Current supply chains are an artifact of present-day manufacturing and information technologies, wherein manufacturing techniques are mechanistic, specialized according to simple repetitive actions. Thus, creating products—and often packaging and repackaging them—entails many stages before they are ready for consumer use. Each link in a supply chain owes its existence as much to the value it adds as to the information it hides. I believe many businesses today exist because they have found economic niches based solely on package size, volume of product transactions, acquisition of information about customer needs, and so on.
The major difference between B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Customer) in internet terms is the role of the B2B website. B2B concerns itself primarily with supply chain management. These are portals that allow businesses to deal directly with their suppliers and distributors online. Allowing electronic transfer of orders, invoicing and even payments. Wholesalers, distributors and manufacturers fall in this category (International Data Corporation, 2000).
B2C websites are intermediary portals to link customers to suppliers. Some of the major ones are ebay, an auction site. Yell, an internet version of yellow pages and ZDNet a technology market place. All of these businesses exist primarily on the internet. They are what is known as e-businesses (electronic businesses). All of them can be classified under one general heading, market places.
B2C concerns itself with selling to the end user. Typically these are sites like Amazon, online book retailers, lastminute.com, a "good times" portal. These sites are more interested in passing the goods to the end user. There is likely a slight difference between them and your business. They are actually internet based. That is to say they exist primarily on the internet......
