Study over C2C markets and possible improvements to Schnappundweg.eu

Online shopping and E-commerce have changed the pattern of many businesses as well as their actors and target customers. There are a number of well-known online markets in different areas namely, Amazon, a Business to Consumer (B2C) platform, and E-bay, a Consumer to Consumer (C2C) market, which have changed the dynamics of supply chain’s end-user interface tremendously. There are many factors which affect the level of popularity of online businesses. Whenever a monetary transaction between a website and a user happens, security and reliability of the website itself and that of all the involved third parties become more and more important and critical. In general, the reliability of an online shopping platform, affected by a number of factors, plays a pivotal role toward customer trust and satisfaction. Trust building factors have been improved during the recent years and are still progressing towards becoming more robust. Anti-fraud features in online shopping platforms have been seasoned over the last few years, resulting in a number of diversified anti-fraud methodologies for a robust online security. Created in 2005, Schnappundweg.eu is a Swiss online C2C platform launched by Serwise AG, an IT consulting company located in Winterthur, Switzerland. This master’s thesis is aimed at improving this platform with the goal of increasing its capabilities and hence its popularity. Furthermore, a business plan for a new geographical user interface has been developed over the course of this Master’s thesis. In the “Literature review” section of this master’s thesis report, characteristics and details of trust and reputation building factors, critical success factors, and buying intention factors in e-commerce websites, specially, C2C online markets, are discussed. The introduction section is dedicated to a brief description of services offered by the platform as well as its technical details. Furthermore, in the “Possible improvements to Schnappundweg.eu” section, outcomes of literature review are compared to services currently offered by this platform and the improvement niches are examined. At the end, a brief marketability research is conducted to choose from a number of Western European countries in order to launch the Schnappundweg.eu. A business plan for Italy as the best fitting country follows in the same section.