Every business leader knows the acronyms.

B2B. B2C. B2G.

We build org charts around them, hire sales teams against them and argue about margin profiles for them. But there's a fourth category that most companies stumble into by accident, serve badly, and leave a huge amount of value on the table with. It deserves a name of its own.

I call it B2BC™: Business to Business Consumer.

A business consumer is, by definition, a business, registered, profitable, buying inputs to make a product. And, they want to transact like a consumer. No sales rep. No credit application. No minimum order. No net-60 terms. No 55-gallon drum. Add to cart. Check out. Ship it.

Once you see B2BC™, you see it everywhere.

Meet Jenny

Jenny runs a stall at a local farmers' market. She sells scented candles, not just good ones, great ones. Hand-poured, with a small loyal local following. By every definition that matters, she's an entrepreneur. She has a registered business, a brand, and real customers who buy real products, and of course, Uncle Sam takes his cut at the end of the year.

To make those candles, Jenny needs waxes, scents, colourings, wicks, and glass jars. She needs them reliably, at a fair price, and in quantities that match her kitchen and her cash flow. Not in a 55-gallon drum of fragrance oil that she has nowhere to put and will take her 4 years to get through.

Here's what Jenny does not want to do. Fill out a six-page customer onboarding form. Get a credit check. Wait five business days for a sales rep to call her back. Negotiate a minimum order quantity. Set up ACH payment terms for a $400 purchase.

She wants to open a browser, find her supplies, pay with a card, and get back to pouring candles.

Meet Jason and John

Jason is a serious woodworker. Over years of trial and error he's developed his own polish, a blend that outperforms anything he can buy off the shelf. He sells it to other woodworkers. It's a real business, but it lives in his garage.

John is a steam train enthusiast. He engineered a lubricant specifically for small-scale engines and track. His customer base is small, obsessive, and fiercely loyal. He ships orders from a spare bedroom.

Both of them, like Jenny, need industrial inputs. Solvents, oils, carriers, containers, labels. Both of them, like Jenny, do not want to be treated like a corporate procurement department, because they are not one. It is frustrating and foreign to them.

They're B2BC™ customers. And there are millions of them.

The Long Tail Isn't a Rounding Error

There's a comfortable assumption in B2B sales that the serious money sits at the top of the pyramid. The named accounts, the enterprise deals, the 26 for 2026 (or what other focus the C-Suite has). The multi-year contracts with steel giants and pharma multinationals. There is no denying it, that's absolutely where the headline revenue lives.

But the tail is not small. In the US:

This is not the fringe of the US economy. In aggregate, it is the US economy. Any B2B company that supplies inputs to manufacturing, crafting, food production, maintenance, hobbyist industries, or specialty trades has a Jenny-shaped opportunity sitting all around them.

The question is whether they are set up to serve her.

Why Most B2B Companies Get This Wrong

The natural instinct for a B2B sales organization meeting a Jenny for the first time is to treat her like a small version of their regular customers. Same laborious onboarding form. Same credit check, which comes back with a preposterous number because she doesn't have a credit history. Same minimum order, which wouldn't fit in her basement even if she tried. Same terms sheet, which she doesn't want to read because the small print is literally size 6 and runs 20 pages.

And Jenny bounces. Not because she can't afford the product. Because the process is too expensive for her in time, paperwork, and commitment. She'll buy an inferior substitute from an e-commerce marketplace because the friction is lower. And you'll never know she existed.

The B2B rep looks at the ten-minute conversation and concludes, reasonably, that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. In a world of quotas and named accounts, they are right. The mistake isn't the rep's. The mistake is that Jenny was ever in the B2B funnel to begin with.

B2BC™ is a different channel, with different economics, different unit sizes, and a different buying experience. It needs to be run as such.

Don't Confuse Your Real B2B Customers

Here's the trap I've watched companies walk into. They try to serve their B2BC™ market by grafting an e-commerce front end onto their main B2B website. Add-to-cart buttons next to enterprise quote forms. Retail pricing next to contract pricing. A chatbot that doesn't know which kind of customer it's talking to.

This confuses everyone.

Your enterprise buyers wonder why their supplier suddenly looks like a consumer brand. Your Jennies wonder why the website wants their corporate purchasing department's email address. Your sales team spends half its day fielding calls from hobbyists. The channels contaminate each other.

The cleaner move is to separate the go-to-market entirely. Your B2B channel sells the way it has always sold. Quotes, reps, contracts, terms. Your B2BC™ channel meets customers where they already shop.

Which brings us to marketplaces.

Why Amazon Is the Obvious Door

Amazon, Shopify storefronts (under a new brand), eBay, specialty marketplaces. These are the natural habitat of the business consumer. Jenny, Jason and John are already there. They buy their personal supplies there, and so they default to the same behaviour when buying for the business.

Here's the part people underestimate. Amazon isn't just a shopping site. It's one of the largest search engines on the internet, often cited as the second or third largest after Google and YouTube. And for product discovery specifically, it's widely treated as the single most dominant search engine in the world. When someone needs something physical, they don't start at google.com anymore, they tend to start at amazon.com.

If Jenny needs soy wax at 3pm on a Tuesday, she's typing "soy wax" into Amazon's search bar. Not calling her supplier's sales line. Not waiting for a quote. If you're not in those search results, for her purposes, you don't exist. She needs her candles by Saturday morning.

Importantly, marketplaces are not where your enterprise buyers procure. A director of manufacturing at a Fortune 500 is not sourcing raw materials through Amazon Business. So a marketplace presence gives you a separate, channel-appropriate storefront that serves Jenny without ever crossing into your enterprise buyer's line of sight.

You can run both channels without confusing either.

The Growth Pipeline Nobody's Watching

Here's the part that turns this from an interesting tactic into a strategic argument.

Imagine Jenny walks onto Shark Tank (Dragons Den for my UK readers). Her candles get picked up. A Costco/Tesco buyer calls. Suddenly, she doesn't need 50 kilos of wax a month. She needs 5,000. Her brand is everywhere. She's now, by any reasonable definition, a B2B customer, and a potentially very large one.

Who does she call?

If you've been her supplier since the farmers' market days, shipping her the right waxes, the right fragrances, the right jars, at the right scale, with zero friction, you are the obvious first call. The relationship is already there. The trust is already there. The product fit is already proven.

If you ignored her because she was too small to be worth a sales rep's time, she calls one of your competitors.

Run this thought experiment across every Jenny, Jason, and John in your category. The B2BC™ channel stops looking like a low-margin annoyance and starts looking like the top of your enterprise funnel.

The Underappreciated Economics

Beyond the growth pipeline, the pure unit economics of a well-run B2BC™ channel are unusually good.

It's stable. Millions of small buyers making small orders is, statistically, one of the smoothest revenue streams you can build. Enterprise accounts come with binary risk. You win the contract or you lose it. Three quarters on, one quarter off. The B2BC™ tail just keeps ordering.

It enables inventory hygiene. Winding down a product line? Sell through the last pallets on the marketplace. Stranded or obsolete inventory? There's a Jenny somewhere who's delighted to buy 40 kilos of a color nobody else wants. The channel acts as a release valve for inventory that would otherwise become a write-down.

Customers pay a premium for convenience. Jenny is not comparing your price per kilo to an enterprise contract. She's comparing it to the friction of doing anything else. Smaller, faster, more convenient carries real pricing power, often 20% to 40% above bulk contract pricing, and your customers are genuinely happier for it.

It's cash pay. This is the one CFOs tend to love when I pitch this. B2B customers pay on terms, Net 30, net 60, sometimes longer. That receivables balance is money you've effectively lent your customer interest-free, and it costs you working capital. B2BC™ customers pay with a credit card at checkout. The cash is in your account before you ship. The credit risk moves to the cardholder and the card network. From a working-capital perspective, a dollar of B2BC™ revenue is worth meaningfully more than a dollar of net-60 B2B revenue.

The Case for Taking This Seriously

B2BC™ marketing is not easy. The customer acquisition work is real. The fulfillment operation is different from bulk shipping. Building a marketplace presence requires capabilities most industrial companies don't natively have. It's genuinely harder than picking up the phone and calling a named account.

But for any business with a B2B core, the B2BC™ channel sitting next door to it is:

The companies that will win the next decade in industrial categories are not the ones who serve Fortune 500 buyers or Jenny. They're the ones who serve both. Cleanly separated, correctly channeled, and fully aware that the Jenny of today is the enterprise account of the day after tomorrow.

That's B2BC™. Once you name it, you can build for it.

Alastair Sanderson is the founder and CBDO of Operio Group and a board member of 2 companies.