Retail Disruption: Case Studies of Blockchain in Action
Blockchain can make digital retail stronger and fairer. How? Based on a consumer’s shopping history, blockchain-powered services can suggest personalized products. Apart from that, blockchain can prove a product’s provenance, as well as make the management of product warranties and loyalty memberships easy, secure and transparent.
Although retail companies can develop their own decentralized blockchain-based applications (Dapps), there are many off-the-shelf solutions from emerging startups available now to ensure cost-efficiency of blockchain adoption.
Blockchain Startups for Retailing
Gaining recognition among businesses, blockchain appeals to startup founders who would like to benefit from having their own blockchain-based product to meet their businesses needs.
There are two types of services that startups provide. First, there are ready-to-use applications. Second, there are blockchain-based platforms which allow developing custom software on top of them. Below are a few examples of such startups in detail.
Shopping Personalization by Shopin
Shopin makes online purchases easier by offering personalized products based on consumers’ previous browsing and shopping experience. With a blockchain at its core, Shopin collects and securely stores user data, providing it to retailers only upon users’ consent.
On top of that, the application gives its users, casual web surfers, the opportunity to earn on retailers’ advertising. By showing personalized ads, retailers credit consumers with tokens. It’s like paying people for ads instead of paying Google or Facebook. Running on AI, such ads are tailored to show relevant messages according to consumers’ previous shopping preferences.
Currently, Shopin counts 719,000 signups and $14.7 mln incremental sales and keeps catching on.
Chronicled Proves Product Authenticity
Counterfeit goods account for 2.5% of global trade, amounting to $461 billion. Blockchain allows preventing fraud, and Chronicled is one of the successful examples to illustrate this.
Leveraging AI, IoT, and blockchain, Chronicled digitally secures physical products’ identities, traces their provenance, and automates these processes with smart contracts. The project has an open-source platform for developers, as well as its own solutions for tracing origins and movement of high-value products, brand protection, and supply chain automation.
Warranteer Makes Warranties Transparent
Warranty management is complicated, both for retailers and customers. Once a problem comes up, a customer should find his/her bill, check whether the warranty is active, and only then submit a request to the retailer. The latter monitors the purchase details, confirms the warranty case, and only after that agrees to repair/replace the item or return the money. Warranteer smoothes out the complexity of these processes with the help of blockchain.
Based on blockchain 2.0, Warranteer is a highly secure application providing its users with the complete warranty tracking functionality. The service enables customers to store their warranties in the cloud and access them on demand. To store the warranty, a user can just scan the bought item and digitally activate its warranty.
qiibee Rewards Loyal Customers
Understanding that 40% of retail revenue comes from loyal customers, qiibee assists in managing loyalty with its blockchain technology.
qiibee provides retailers with a blockchain platform for developing custom loyalty-specific Dapps. The software development kit by qiibee includes a web wallet and dashboards for a transparent and secure allocation of loyalty tokens. Currently, Superdry, Domino’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Subway, and other retail companies already use qiibee-based apps.
Make a Try
Although a lot of blockchain services focusing on retail are emerging on the market, there’s still room for custom-built solutions that cater to very particular needs.
If you’re up to building your own Dapp but don’t feel like creating your own blockchain for this, you can opt for an ecosystem that will allow you to cut development costs. genEOS is one of the environments to consider. With its scalability and the capacity of processing millions of transactions per second, genEOS is extremely efficient for retail. In addition, the platform has no transaction fees, which appeals to retail with its billions of transactions.
Choices Are There
Blockchain applications can make retailers’ relationships with customers easier, more transparent and secure. Such Dapps are starting to emerge on the market for a whole variety of business challenges, from ad personalization to loyalty management. For other purposes not yet covered by the startups, there are ready-to-run blockchain environments like genEOS helping to develop a Dapp with less time and budget.
