The B2C e-business model generates revenues from several sources.
E-Retail
Retail sales directly to consumers are often called e-tail or e-retail. Many traditional brick-and-mortar retailers and catalog merchants are combining websites to become brick-and-click businesses, or e-retailers. These websites are generating leads (sales) and improving customer services. For example, Best Buy (electronics), JCPenney (retail) and PETCO (pet supplies).
B2C starting with no existing brick-and-mortar store are called pure-play e-retailers. There has been mixed success for pure-play e-retailers, the most famous example is Amazon.
Niche markets, a smaller targeted market within a larger market, have succeeded by avoiding competition with larger e-businesses.
Advertising Revenues
Some B2C e-businesses offer free content - information, links, games, and so on, and generate revenues by selling advertising on their web sites. Ads are usually linked to the advertisers web site, therefore clicking an ad is a process called a click-through. The effectiveness of a web site is often measured by the number of visitors who use it to click-through to the advertised web site.
Subscription Fees
Another way to make money is to charge subscription fees for premium content and services. Premium services such as posting personal ads, job search, and online communities. Yahoo! Premium, AngiesList and Match.com are examples of subscription content.
Non-profit organizations also follow the B2C subscription e-business model. For example, the Consumers Union is an independent consumer product testing organization that publishes the Consumer reports magazine at its' online version, Consumer Reports.org.
Social Media
Social Media includes social networking, social opinion, social tagging, micro blogging, etc and has had an impact on personal communication. Businesses are exploring the benefits of social media, including the network effect, to promote business and specific industry, to sell products and services to their customers, or to generate revenues by selling advertising space. For example, Facebook is selling advertising space, businesses solicit reviews of their sites by members at StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking or tagging sites in order to build traffic to their sites and Twitter is being used to broadcast a variety of Tweets, from specials to new offerings to CEO business status updates.
