Customer’s ways of shopping is now changed and will be forever different after pandemic. The new situation asks retailers to satisfy their customers not only offline or online but the two should be connected and synchronized everywhere at any time. The transformation in retails is accelerating worldwide even further and under massive pressure due to the pandemic. The story is no longer revolving around the story of brick-and-mortar to the new retail but taking online retail to another level with transparency and personalization. Therefore, new retail requires new resolutions. This is where blockchain development in retail comes to make everything easier for both businesses and customers. Many parts of the fast and seamless experience required are now backed by various technologies, and blockchain is one of the superiors.
Blockchain Benefits in Retails
1. Track Inventory
Blockchain helps each party involved in the supply chain to connect with the others. Communication between parties within the supply chain is streamlined, which minimizes errors across stages. Blockchain is also a decentralized ledger that provides complete security and transparency to all the transactions in the supply chain.
2. Prevent Fraud
The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) released a study stating that trade in counterfeit and pirated goods has risen steadily in the last few years – even as overall trade volumes stagnated – and now stands at 3.3% of global trade. This trend has been building up online shoppers’ doubt over what they purchase but can not really “touch” in advance. Then retail leaders are now using blockchain technology to prevent counterfeit items from reaching consumers since it was proven to successfully prevent fraudulent transactions in digital currency exchanges.
Blockchain technology helps the product manufacturers to ensure the quality and the authenticity of the products they produce. The customers could browse through the origin of every single ingredient within the item, promoting transparency and let shoppers take the initiative to know about the products they used
3. Manage Loyalty Points
In fact, only 13% of all shoppers are loyal to just one food retailer. The result is a maze of point systems and redemption options, with cumbersome processes for exchanging points among program partners. Loyalty programs are ripe for some kind of disruptive innovation that would make them easier to use. This is where blockchain development in retail comes in as a solution. It allows businesses to trade through a loyalty engine with each other in a decentralized and trustless open protocol system. Blockchain helps to put all the reward earnings of a consumer to a decentralized ledger on the blockchain that can be created by any vendor who wishes to enroll a consumer in the loyalty engine or by the consumers themselves. In this way, loyalty points would be more easily transferable or tradable. From a business perspective, liabilities are cleared off the books more quickly, and program information would also be more accurate and more up-to-date.
4. Automate Repetitive Back Office Tasks
The Covid-19 pandemic has required more digitized transactions, including those which execute autonomously, unhindered by lockdowns and delays in the supply chain systems. Companies are now using blockchain “smart contracts” to handle the purchase and sale of their goods and services to ensure quicker payments and seamless transactions. Once a transaction has been confirmed, any attempt to alter an earlier entry in the ledger would affect all the subsequent blocks. Such a change would be immediately apparent to everyone on the network.
As for such secure and immediate advantage within a system, blockchain is open beyond just contracts. The technology can help improve employee efficiency and streamline HR processes. The team can get quicker and more accurate results since repetitive data-heavy tasks such as payroll are now digitized. The transformation would allow businesses to put more focus on more strategic work like expanding their sales network, investing more in their customer relationships, and many more.
Companies are Seeing Promising Progress with Blockchain Technology
Blockchain in the retail industry is no more in fantasy papers. Several prominent giants have been the trailblazers in such adoptions. And the results have proven them rather right when putting trust in business transformation with blockchain.
1. Walmart
Walmart has consistently been one of the retail sector’s biggest trailblazers for blockchain development in retail. It is involved with several food safety initiatives, such as the Blockchain Food Safety Alliance, IBM’s Food Trust, and the Walmart China Food Traceability Program. These initiatives have featured big names like IBM, Carrefour, JD.com, VeChain, and PwC.
2. IKEA
IKEA Iceland has used Ethereum technology to settle an invoice with a local retailer, accepting payment in blockchain field digital cash. Supply chain payments firm Tradeshift facilitated the transfer using an Ethereum-based version of the Icelandic króna created by ConsenSys-backed startup Monerium. Monerium, based in Reykjavik, is a startup that has been authorized by the Icelandic Financial Supervisory Authority (FME) as the first electronic money institution, making it the first to have regulatory approval to provide fiat payment services on blockchain systems across Europe. This currency is not a cryptocurrency, but ‘real’ currency in electronic format, a digital alternative to cash, programmable in smart contracts.
“A programmable financial supply chain, where trading partners can connect information flows to money flows through smart contracts, will transform how suppliers and customers interact,” Stefán Árnason, CFO of IKEA Iceland, stated.
3. Amazon
The world’s largest online retailer are having a project focusing on billing and reconciliation systems to provide transparency on trans-national financial data as the job description states, “This is an opportunity to define a technology architectural direction of a greenfield area for Amazon’s advertising business using Blockchain technology.”
The general idea is that a distributed ledger can get everyone on the same page about where advertising dollars are going and avoid discrepancies. This soon helps their vendors to see where their investment goes and which is working the best or worst, so they can optimize their advertising costs within the eCommerce system.
Overall, we do see that blockchain development in retail is beyond cryptocurrency. The potentiality is vast out there for retailers to adopt the technology and further optimize their performance on a vast scale. Many early adopters have proven it works, so your business no longer needs to risk the uncertainty.
Blockchain is that savior in this changing age for your retail company. Being one of the Top Blockchain Development Companies in the global market, HUVITEK has proficient blockchain specialists possessing the ability to offer decentralized exchange development catered to any size of business. Contact us and discover the solutions to transform your retail business performance with blockchain technology.
HUVITEK – The Reliable Software, Blockchain & Techhnology Partner
🌐 Contact us
✉️ Email: [email protected]
☎️ Tel: + 84 888 780 670
👉🏻 WhatsApp/Telegram: + 84 888 780 670
🪙 Presence: Vietnam (Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City) / Singapore / Australia
