The Growing Pains of Ecommerce and how to Deal With Them
With the rise of the ecommerce industry, many brick-and-mortar retailers have been transitioning their services to the internet to meet rising demand. However, with the sheer number of stores and brands on the internet, it is difficult for any business to compete with each other in terms of brand awareness.
Advertising through the internet is quite expensive for retailers. These retailers have to pay a fee in the range of 15–50% of their selling price in order to list their advertisements on the various ecommerce platforms, and this extra cost ends up being passed onto the consumer. In addition, most ecommerce platforms sell advertisements to ‘bump’ up the position of the listing on their pages, in which the listing with the highest position gains the most prominence among consumers. As this position is dependent on the amount retailers are willing to pay, you can see that the system is skewed in favour of the wealthier retailers.
One dangerous aspect of online advertising is that retailers are often left at the mercy of the ecommerce platform owners. These owners can block retailers from transacting, change their rules and regulations, and choose when they pay the retailers for their sales on their platforms. Retailers have a lack of control over what happens to them, and they have to simply trust the ecommerce platform to treat them fairly. Transaction data such as reviews, purchase history, and ratings are also owned by the platform rather than the retailers. This means that if the retailers were to jump ship to another ecommerce platform, they would not be able to bring over their valuable transaction data.
Additionally, there also exists inherent issues with online advertising that reduce its usefulness for retailers. Research has shown that nearly 50% of all advertising traffic is generated by bots. Thus, any figures or statistics that retailers derive from their advertising views are likely to be misleading. There is no guarantee that the advertisements will be seen by legitimate consumers. Also, the advertisements are also mismatched with the needs of consumers. Promotions are not shown to consumers at the right times (such as when consumers are within the vicinity of the store). There is no appropriate platform where the customers’ needs are analyzed such that the right advertisements are shown to them in an efficient manner.
With so many pertinent issues, is that a platform or service that can resolve them to take online marketing to the next level? The answer comes in the form of Centareum, an end-to-end proximity based mobile marketing platform powered by blockchain technology and artificial intelligence.
Centareum has near zero listing fees, and this is made possible with blockchain technology. The listing fees now only consists of the transaction cost of advertisements and no longer includes superfluous costs like ‘bumping’ the position of the advertisement. .This enables retailers to only incur a fee in the 1% range of their selling prices, and these cost savings can be then passed onto consumers. The next improvement is that retailers can now take complete ownership over their transaction data. Their reviews and profile data is able to stay the same throughout the entire Centareum blockchain network.
Lastly, Centareum provides retailers with deep analytics and is able to reliably reach their target consumers. Retailers have access to real-time conversion rates and customer analytics to analyze consumer needs and wants. A business validation mechanism on the platform ensures that the right target audience will be able to see the right advertisements in under 5 minutes. This solves the botting issue that plagues online marketing.
As with any new industry, there will be a need to find solutions to growing pains. For the ecommerce industry, this solution could potentially be the Centareum platform. It promises to resolve pertinent issues with online marketing with blockchain technology and artificial intelligence. Retailers who are looking for an effective solution to market their online platforms can consider using Centareum as it is able to fulfill their needs at minimum cost.
Find out more about Centareum in the links below!
