Nearly a decade since its inception, Shopify has been chosen by a big number of startups and entrepreneurs all throughout the glob to expand or migrate businesses to the web. Nowadays, Shopify is extremely popular, which is largely due to its competitive rates. It has a lesser monthly cost, with maximum services, making it very popular indeed.
E-commerce or electronic commerce continues to evolve at a fast pace, and an organization has to keep up with the latest online shopping trends to continue boosting sales and to stay on the competitive edge. E-commerce has been around for decades and the industry evolution has been exemplary. Through the years, the online selling concept has been influenced deeply by technological enhancements. The latest among the technologies is blockchain. It’s poised to revolutionize the industry, with its unparalleled potential. From the eradication of the middlemen to simplifying operations as well as reducing complexities in all levels, Blockchain has a lot to offer to help online businesses resolve their day-to-day and long-term challenges.
The Shopify shopping platform has integrated Blockchain with the use of Bitcoin, by adding Bitcoin payment systems. With a base of more than 70,000 online stores and shops, the amount of goods that potentially could be bought with Bitcoin has once again expanded.
THE PAIN POINTS AND CHALLENGES OF THE E-COMMERCE INDUSTRY
The e-commerce market always has been very competitive, with players of all sizes offering the same services and products. Thus, businesses need to embrace smarter business models as well as technologies to stay competitive.
Aside from the challenge of competition, another pain point of sellers, including Shopify is that the traditional business model has middlemen who take away a huge slice of the earnings in the selling process. For example, sellers need to pay transaction processing fees for facilitating payments for transactions completion.
Another major concern for businesses is to build the trust of consumers, reassuring them that their financial and personal details are entirely safe. For this reason, sellers have to invest hugely in data encryption most of the time as well as other measures to prevent hacking.
E-commerce selling is complicated process since it involves a range of operations, like logistics, supply chain, payments and more. Managing the operations and the involved intermediaries is another major challenge. As the challenges have been overwhelming since from the start, they’ve been looking for one technology that could handle them all. Fortunately, the perfect answer is blockchain. As a decentralized system, brings a host of benefits for the domain, such as Shopify.
BLOCKCHAIN AND E-COMMERCE, A WINNING COMBINATION
Regardless of the positive impact that e-commerce has had on the worldwide economy, things haven’t been very bright for the domain since it has been ridden with challenges from the very beginning. The secured technological backbone that e-commerce retailers have been looking for is the blockchain technology.
BENEFITS OF BLOCKCHAIN
With the extensive benefits of e-commerce Blockchain, it becomes imperative for business organizations to embrace it for huge growth. For a retailer, like for instance a retailer that requires the services of a Shopify development company, that wants to add transparency in all transactions as well as manage consumer data in a most reliable manner, the technology serves as the best solution. Aside from this, Blockchain could also minimize dependence on paper-based legacy systems and open up to crypto-transactions as well.
Having the right technology partner and the right Shopify development company is a must when looking to explore the futuristic technology to take the e-commerce business to the next level. There are many service providers with advanced e-commerce solutions, which leverage the power of Blockchain.
Interesting post, Rakesh, but I am somehow less upbeat about the immediate future of blockchain, mainly because of some of the disadvantages of the technology that you can read about in https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/bitcoin-blockchain-issues/18019/ and https://medium.com/nudjed/blockchain-advantage-and-disadvantages-e76dfde3bbc0.
While I see some scope for smart contracts a blockchain technology in no way removes an intermediary without replacing it by another. As a consequence of its very principle Blockchain is far from being efficient (anecdote: Bitcoin mining centers in Iceland are about to consume more energy than that island’s entire population). And, yes, the trust thing: Especially thinking of Bitcoin, more than 50 percent of all miners are organized in 4 pools, which reduces the trust level a lot, as the independence is not given. And then there are only 80% of all miners in China, not a country with a reputation for allowing trust. Lastly, by the very nature of blockchain accounts are transparent, which is probably nothing that many companies will accept. After all they do not want to become too transparent financially.
So, while it is an interesting technology, there are a bunch of obstacles to overcome. I’d rather see private blockchain technologies being set up by the very companies that you seem to see being replaced first (banks, payment providers).
Just my two cent
Thomas
@twieberneit