What is “Business-to-Consumer” (B2C)?
Business-to-Consumer (B2C) describes companies that sell directly to individual end-consumers — as opposed to Business-to-Business (B2B) companies that sell to other businesses. B2C spans retail, consumer apps, subscription services, food delivery, e-commerce, financial products, and direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands. The defining characteristic is the customer is a person, not an organisation.
B2C characteristics
- Shorter sales cycles: individual decision-making; no procurement committee.
- Smaller individual transaction values: compensated by volume.
- Marketing-led acquisition: brand, content, ads, influence, performance marketing.
- Emotional purchase drivers: design, aspiration, social signal matter more than feature sheets.
- Higher churn / repeat dynamics: subscription B2C requires constant engagement.
- Mass communication channels: social, paid digital, broadcast, influencer.
B2C vs. B2B
- Customer: individual vs. organisation.
- Deal size: small + frequent vs. large + infrequent.
- Sales motion: self-serve and marketing vs. sales-team and pre-sales.
- Buying timeline: minutes to days vs. weeks to quarters.
- Loyalty dynamics: emotional + brand vs. switching cost + integration depth.
The B2C legal stack
Selling to consumers triggers the protective layer of the law wherever the customer sits. In Türkiye that means the Consumer Protection Law and distance-contracts regime: mandatory pre-contractual information, the 14-day withdrawal right for online sales (with statutory exceptions), strict rules on auto-renewal and price changes, and the Advertisement Board policing claims and dark patterns. Add KVKK for the marketing machine (consent and İYS for electronic messages, cookie compliance for tracking) and platform liability where sales run through marketplaces. The architectural consequence: B2C terms cannot simply be shortened B2B terms — choice of law and arbitration clauses largely yield to consumer-forum protections, and unenforceable boilerplate is itself a compliance finding.