Just like Blockchain is now changing the whole economy marketplaces have once changed the way people buy and sell.
The arrival of Amazon, eBay and Alibaba has dramatically changed the retail landscape and opened new opportunities for producers, sellers, and consumers. As this new way of buying and selling could offer real convenience to all the parties, the number of online marketplaces has exploded. Now online marketplaces can literally sell anything to anyone and this tendency urges almost every store owner if not completely go online then at least have an online option as well as the offline one.
Today when we speak of ьarketplaces we mean not only buying and selling goods but also services: Airbnb, Uber, TaskRabbit. Those are completely changing not only the way we buy and sell but also the way we live, ride and make home improvements.
The benefits of marketplaces to both consumers and sellers as compared with offline options are pretty obvious:
– they aren’t just serving one base of customers but connect buyers and sellers, service providers and consumers;
– they enable customers to select from a vast number of products for comparison in one place;
– the platform offers reduced marketing costs compared to other sales channels;
– marketplace pricing is driven by competition for the benefit of consumers
But oftentimes what is lacking from these platforms are two crucial elements: transparency and social interactions.
With the emergence of Blockchain technology, we can witness a new stage of marketplace development where these two key elements can be implemented.
Adding the Blockchain technology to your marketplace can offer new opportunities for several important aspects: payments, user interactions, and agreements.
Since Blockchain makes it possible to remove intermediaries, it can add the most crucial thing most of the platforms are missing — transparency.
Over the past 20 years, the world economy has been progressively moving away from the traditional form of centralized institutions. Now we see the idea of a third party like bank or government as an unnecessary intermediary, that has no transparency in interactions and gives lower personal control. At some point, we can not influence and observe the progress of the transaction and, of course, it leads to uncertainty. With no middlemen all transactions become traceable on a public ledger, demonstrating a high level of security and transparency.
Moreover, Blockchain makes the platform completely auditable by all participants. This leads to fairer pricing for clients, as all prices are visible and verifiable. Potential customers are able to select the provider that best suits their needs, both financially and practically.
In addition, blockchain technology involves smart contracts — self-executing digitally signed arrangements written into lines of code and made via distributed computing platforms like Ethereum. Smart contracts are stored publicly, preventing any kind of fraud or swindle.
The main goal of a smart contract is to enable two anonymous parties to trade and do business with each other, usually over the internet, without the need for a middleman.
And one final point. Blockchain allows to issue your own crypto token and this could be essential for your platform for several reasons. Some of them, like simplified payment process and transparency, were mentioned above and don’t necessarily require your own token and can be achieved just by implementing existing ones. But speaking of user interactions, having your own token within a platform can become crucial.
In the case of the MeetnGreetMe platform, we issued our own crypto token not only to make the payment transparent and convenient but also to incentivize people to actively use the platform, co-create, fulfill their roles and fuel the platform’s ecosystem. Today MeetnGreetMe is a community-centric and -driven business and anyone is welcome to participate in accordance with their interests — as a MeetnGreeter, ambassador, author or co-creator, photographer etc. WelcomeСoins make it possible to incentivize MeetnGreetMe users to play different roles while all together contribute to the ecosystem development and to get rewarded.
So to sum up, it’s now the right time to introduce blockchains, because one of the fundamental promises of this technology is to bring the power back to the edges. In other words, give power back to users.
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