E-COMMERCE: AFTER BOOM AND BUST BUSINESS VOCABULARY IN USE (ADVANCED)

 

BUSINESS VOCABULARY IN USE (ADVANCED) 30. E-COMMERCE: AFTER BOOM AND BUST

 

A Old economy, new economy In the late 1990s companies raised vast amounts of money from investors for e-commerce Internet sites, both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B). B2B, where businesses obtain supplies using the Internet, is also referred to as e-procurement. B B2C In business-to-consumer e-commerce, sites were set up selling everything from pet food to clothes. Among the survivors, there are companies like Amazon, pure-play (exclusively) online sellers, with no traditional shops – no bricks-and-mortar outlets. This is pure e-tailing. C B2B In business-to-business e-commerce, groups of companies can set up public exchanges. For example, the World Wide Retail Exchange allows companies to bid to supply participating retailers in a reverse auction on the Internet – the supplier offering the lowest price gets the contract. EXERCISES 30.1 Match the two parts of these sentences containing expressions from A opposite. 1 B2B e-commerce can cut firms’ costs because a the low pieces they promised consumers meant that the scale of their business had to be enormous. 2 The company operates four e-commerce sites, b but I felt more comfortable investing in a fund whose core holding are large multinationals. 30.2 Complete the sentences with appropriate forms of expressions from B and C opposite. 1. Retailer A sells clothes in shops and also over the Internet: it has __________- __________- __________ outlets 2. Retailer B sells books and CDs on the Internet and has no shops: it has no __________- __________- __________- __________, so it’s involved in __________- __________- __________.

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