The increase in proliferation of technological innovations including the internet has transformed the entire business scenario in China. Businesses are slowly shifting from the offline traditional mode of business to present day’s online transaction and exchange of goods and services. In effect, online business transactions involving consumers, also known as consumer to consumer (C2C) ecommerce are also spontaneously increasing in China. This dissertation aims to establish an understanding on the behaviour patterns, loyalty and trust activities of online consumers within the C2C online business context. This research also aims to establish the effective relationship marketing strategies that can be adopted by online marketers in the C2C business to market their products. This research adopts intepretivism philosophy, inductive approach and both interview and questionnaire research instruments to collect viable information from a number of conveniently sampled interviewees. Information obtained from the interviewees is analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively and at the same time backed up by theoretical information obtained from different academic sources. This dissertation establishes that online consumers exhibit different behavioural patterns, loyalty and trust activities. Issues of security, reliability and vendor reputation play very vital roles in the C2C ecommerce in China. Also, this research establishes that the Chinese people value relationships and that is why the “Guanxi” concept is not only important in the conventional business setup but is also very vital to online transactions. Before engaging in up-sale or down-sale activities, consumers first look into the kind of relationship they enjoy with the product vendor. Knowledge of consumer behaviour, loyalty, trust and relationship building activities is meant to help online marketers to adopt effective marketing strategies aimed at capturing consumer trends. This research aims to establish the right marketing approaches to be adopted by participants in online consumer-to-consumer ecommerce transactions including relationship marketing strategies to be adopted by the same. In light of these aims, this paper adopts the following objectives;
- To establish consumer behaviour in the consumer-to-consumer ecommerce context
- To establish the loyalty development activities and patterns of consumers in consumer-to-consumer ecommerce
- To establish trust development activities of consumers within the consumer-to-consumer ecommerce setup
- To establish how up-selling and down-selling aspects of relationship marketing impact on consumers during consumer-to-consumer ecommerce transactions