C2C e-commerce is an online transaction between individual consumers. In C2C online transactions, consumers sell goods and services to other consumers. There are many people involved in the transaction, and the products traded are also rich in variety. Such transactions are generally participated in by third parties (such as the eBay platform) or conducted on social networks, who organize, manage and facilitate the transaction. For example, in October 2016, Facebook launched the “Market” (Facebook Marketplace) feature, allowing users to buy and sell items on Facebook. In the field of cross-border e-commerce, many cross-border e-commerce platforms such as eBay and Wish allow individuals to register accounts. In addition to the fact that the C2C model does not require sellers to have corporate qualifications when registering an account, from the perspective of the transaction process, the cross-border C2C and B2C models are almost the same. However, since the C2C model is difficult to guarantee in terms of security, reliability, credit and cost compared to B2C, many cross-border e-commerce platforms have imposed strict restrictions on the CC model. For example, eBay only allows new individual accounts to upload 5 products, and the quota will be gradually increased based on sales performance, while there is no such restriction for corporate accounts. Although AliExpress started out as a C2C model, it has closed personal accounts since 2016 and only allows companies to register.
From the development trend, cross-border C2C will account for a smaller and smaller proportion of various types of cross-border e-commerce because it is difficult to meet the development requirements of the platform, improve the consumer experience of buyers, and meet the relevant regulatory requirements of government agencies on cross-border e-commerce (such as supervision of import tariffs and product quality). In practice, the qualifications of sellers on various cross-border e-commerce platforms are becoming more and more stringent. Most people who are interested in engaging in cross-border e-commerce do not go through the C2C model, but directly start from B2C.