Plaza - Fixing a broken ecommerce system.

Anybody with a physical store can tell you that they can now more than ever feel the impact of ecommerce on their sales - businesses have gone bankrupt and malls have closed, and it makes sense - the amount of convenience ecommerce offers to users is immense. This is a big reason why companies like Amazon have become trillion-dollar companies in record time.

A feat even century old corporations have been unable to achieve. But as rosy as it may be, current ecommerce models have two 'fatal' flaws that dare is say - are the biggest reason the ecommerce industry is only a slice of the entire retail industry, ($2 trillion - Ecommerce as compared to the $25 trillion of the global retail market). To bridge this gap, present ecommerce models need to get rid of these two problems. Luckily there's a start-up that can fix them.

It's called Plaza or Plaza Systems and it's completely based of blockchain.

But let's take a step, back shall we?

What exactly are these problems that need fixing and how will Plaza fix them. To keep this read easy on the eyes, I’ll only talk about one, look out for my other posts for other fixes ;)

Ecommerce is currently too costly and i know, there are some factors that can't be fixed in terms of cost like delivery, well unless hyperloop for packages gets here. There are some that can be fixed though, in particular the overall transaction costs. See in order to accept payments on a website you need to set up a payment processor, could be PayPal, could be stripe.

These 'intermediaries' tend to impose a really high price upon the transaction, taking a huge percentage off the payment. This in turn causes retailers to fix their prices in order to properly account for this thus causing a price increase for the customer or swallow the cost and see their margins depleted. All this was necessary though because without these payment processors nothing would work, until now. Plaza will utilize blockchain and smart contracts to facilitate a two-way transaction and cut out the middleman.

The cool part is as a buyer, you can earn free PL$ (or PlazaDollars - the company's main transaction coins) every time you complete specific/useful activities within the platform. These activities include identifying bugs within the system, participating in the specified referral programs or affiliate programs and offering translation services, you can find out more about the Plaza Lifestyle Rewards program here.

Users can also purchase the PlazaConcierge which is a unique smart speaker that's based off Amazon Alexa's AI that can perform every function other smart devices perform while also allowing you mine Plaza and PL$ on the Merchant Chain blockchain.

Plaza is looking to raise 100,000 ETH from its token sale process. Here’s how the funds raised will be used.

It’s 27/10/2018 and according to coin market cap 100,000 ETH is valued at USD 20,914,000 $ (at $205 per Ethereum) Once it has the funds, Plaza will use the money to facilitate a few important functions, for example 40% of the funds ($ 8,365,600) will be used to fund research and development, that plus the development of other important parts of the system such as the smart contracts, the actual plaza platform, the distribution of the Plaza debit cards and the design and development of the UI, SDKs and hardware components.

To make this possible, the company will need to open a research and development center and ramp up its technical workforce to just about 50 engineers. Speaking of what's best for the users, Plaza will invest 5% of the funds (equivalent to $1,045,700 USD) to ensuring security, this will include implementing the necessary protocols and standards, working with security teams and designing institution grade architecture, all this to ensure all the user data is private and safe.

But all this awesomeness would be useless if nobody knows Plaza even existed, which is why Plaza will be investing a significant piece of the funds to marketing and outreach efforts, $7,319,900 USD to be exact.

These funds will be used to fund the incentive and affiliate programs. The last 20% of the 100,000 ETH will be used on administrative and operational expenses, think servers, salaries customer service strategies and legal expenses. I really believe the future of business is online and with the number of internet users growing rapidly by the day, you can bet Plaza is ready to take on the internet of the future. Blockchain style!

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