Blockchain eCommerce Beyond Cryptocurrency
Blockchain eCommerce can be a very powerful tool for enterprises wanting to make the most of their B2B platform. In general, the concept is that it is a distributed and transparent form of tracking every transaction that occurs within the life cycle or existence of the respective tracked item. Though blockchain has become popularized by cryptocurrency endeavors like Bitcoin, blockchain doesn’t always involve cryptocurrency. One of the things about blockchain that's very powerful is that by nature it’s immutable — not changeable — by implementing complex cryptography, encryption, and hashing. Hashing creates a unique fingerprint of the data, so any attempt to modify it can be detected, a key component with blockchain.
Blockchain eCommerce and Supply Chain Management
Blockchain can be utilized in many different ways to facilitate core processes within eCommerce and the transactional processes that are associated with B2B eCommerce. For an enterprise-level company, there are several key aspects that benefit dramatically from blockchain. One of those is supply chain management, in particular the sourcing of items that make up the pieces of the larger item (for example, gold and diamonds sourced from different parts of the world that come together to form a final product). Blockchain can help someone investigate each of the steps in supply chain management to prevent sourcing of components by inhumane means. Blockchain can track and manage the items all the way through the supply chain management through the different vendors, distribution, and manufacturing points.
Using blockchain can help enterprise companies provide transparency regarding exactly what occurred, when it occurred, and by whom. Here are three common examples of how blockchain can apply to different eCommerce business models:
- Tracking the origin of components from conflict areas of the world such as minerals, spices, or diamonds. Tracking the source becomes very important because there can be laws that need to be enforced.
- Blockchain can similarly help protect intellectual property (IP) and digital goods, ensuring something isn't pirated or reverse-engineered.
- Perishable items can be tracked back to particular suppliers that conducted certain steps of the supply chain in order to find the source of a contended issue. This can be very helpful for quality assurance and being able to link defects to their respective source.
Blockchain for SCM
Your B2B platform can be your central location for supply chain management and anything having to do with blockchain. We’ll show you just how easy it is.
eCommerce Blockchain Data Preservation
From a data perspective, blockchain can also be very helpful to identify and understand the underlying data in an immutable way. In other words, none of the supply chain points can change the data later. Doing so makes the data more credible and accurate. Blockchain data is typically shared and distributed by nature, so the concept is that whenever data gets updated in blockchain, it gets shared across a network in a secure way without being editable.
In addition, within a Clarity eCommerce framework, we enable access to this supply chain management blockchain view if desired by a client. One example might be for a very high-end diamond, being able to see where it was sourced. Using blockchain, the platform is able to show that it was sourced ethically. Other data can accompany it, such as financial transactions and approval steps during the course of the financial transaction.
This can be very helpful to facilitate trade in foreign countries, because the infrastructure can help prevent theft or crimes that occur around fraudulent transactions. It can also help weed out misrepresented items. These risks can be significantly diminished by having a very strong distributed ledger among blockchain eCommerce platforms. It forensically verifies who was involved in every transaction and what steps the item took to reach a particular company.
All of these aspects give more robust tracking of fulfillment and financial aspects of the transactions, and the process can be tied to cryptocurrency for payments. This can help many companies reduce their transaction costs and fees, and also to work with markets that they might not otherwise work with.
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Improved Inventory Management
Blockchain can help companies ensure that every component they put into a product is ethically sourced. Let us show you exactly how it works.
Keep Track of Inventory
Blockchain can also be used internally for inventory management and the ability to understand, in a more data-persistent way, what's happening to each inventory. Granular transaction history is assigned to each item, where it may have been moved to, what its history was, and where it was located.
This helps enforce strong controls over inventory, optimize for fulfillment, and manage quality assurance for any type of manufacturing process. If there are any defects, the transactional data is there to see which team member or location completed this manufacturing to know who to give feedback to. All of this is an excellent way to improve quality control.
Protect the Integrity of Reviews
In addition, it can be very helpful to use blockchain for other processes that might be unique to a particular organization. Reviews are an excellent example, allowing B2B eCommerce businesses to have a more robust verification of a customer's background information whenever they complete a review. This will increase the credibility of a product review by being able to tie an actual purchaser to each review and verify it through blockchain.
Mechanically, this can be a mechanism to allow the end-users who actually purchased something to be the ones who provide reviews. Having fake reviews and fake transactions can be a big challenge with getting accurate views, especially vendors on a B2B marketplace platform who may be trying to increase their ratings by providing fraudulent reviews.
Blockchain can provide another helpful eCommerce solution: preventing fraudulent transactions by enforcing meticulous tracking and detailed steps. It can be much easier to identify a pattern of a fraudulent purchaser and prevent those associated chargebacks that would otherwise occur.
Blockchain and the User Dashboard
These are some of the scenarios that blockchain enables, and Clarity can incorporate this detailed data into areas of the user's dashboard so that they can see the steps of a blockchain within a sales order. This can include supply chain management; we can present data to the end-user based on their role and what access is necessary at particular points of the process.
This can be very helpful to enable companies to meet certain requirements that they have for security clearance requirements, ethical sourcing, or other general use scenarios where they need a certain level of quality. In other words, they know that they're only going to get quality materials with this item if it's been sourced from these particular locations. Being able to drill down as an end-user and look at the history of where an item came from is very helpful.
Clarity Provides Blockchain for eCommerce
As you can see, blockchain is about so much more than just cryptocurrency. Everything above can be incorporated into your eCommerce platform, and from there into a user's dashboard. From there, they can learn any information that the blockchain has stored during the creation of an item.
Clarity can make this happen for you, adding blockchain advantages to your current eCommerce framework or during brand-new B2B eCommerce development. Contact us to see exactly what we can do to help your business.
Make the Most of Blockchain
Clarity can help you merge blockchain resources into your eCommerce business model. We’d love to show you how and give you a quote.