O2O is our industry’s stupidest acronym

There are a lot of acronyms in the ecommerce industry. B2C, C2C, and B2B and other abbreviations like them can be confusing at first for people new to the scene, but once you remember what the letters stand for, they’re easy enough to figure out.

The exception to that rule, though, is O2O. O2O is a terrible, stupid acronym and we should stop using it.

For those who don’t know, O2O stands for “online to offline.” It’s a term used to describe a variety of ecommerce services that provide online information, services, or discounts to consumers that enhance their offline shopping experiences. Group buying sites like Groupon are O2O services; they provide online discounts for real-world shopping experiences like restaurants and movie theaters.

O2O as an approach to commerce is great; if you’re running an O2O business, more power to you! But as an acronym, it’s awful. First of all, the two Os stand for different things, which makes O2O unnecessarily confusing. If you’re not completely clear on the concept and trying to remember based on the acronym, O2O could mean “online to offline” or “offline to online”. If you can remember that B stands for business and C stands for consumer, then you can grasp the meaning of acronyms like B2C or C2C at a glance. But with O2O, even if you remember one O stands for offline and one stands for online, you still don’t know what the acronym means.

More importantly, though, even if you do remember that it means “online to offline” and not vice versa, that really doesn’t tell you very much. In the broadest sense, everything on the internet is “online to offline.” Even traditional ecommerce can be understood as “online to offline”; customers purchase items online and then receive them offline.

This guy just went from online to offline.

In fact, the phrase “online to offline” violates the naming conventions seen with all the other types of ecommerce. Business to business, business to consumer, consumer to consumer: these are all descriptions of where the product goes in this particular business model. In a B2B business, one business sells its product to another. In a B2C business, a business sells a product to consumers. It makes sense. But “online to offline” doesn’t work this way. The product is not going from online to offline; the product was offline to begin with. O2O is a description of where the consumer goes. Why?

Following the conventions we see used in terms like B2C, a better acronym would be something like R2OC (retail to online consumer), or maybe R2IC (retail to internet consumer) if you want to avoid the potential online/offline confusion. That’s still not perfect, but at least it’s a clearer acronym and it follows industry naming conventions by describing where the product goes.

Now look, I’m not crazy. I’m well aware the O2O ship has already sailed, and I haven’t bothered to come up with a perfect acronym for this business model because I’m well aware no one will use it anyway. For most people in the industry (including me) there’s no real impetus to change: O2O may be stupid, but we already know what it means.

So why bring this up at all? Because I hope that we’ll be able to avoid making this mistake the next time a new business model or tech concept needs naming. A certain amount of jargon is inevitable in any industry, but one should still avoid making things unnecessarily confusing. This is doubly true for the tech industry, which aspires to be both truly global and easily accessible. Having nonsensical acronyms makes the industry harder to understand for people who are just getting started, and that’s not a good thing.

It’s probably too late to kill O2O, but I hope that when future innovation necessitates the creation of a new acronym, we can come up with something that’s a bit more logical.