Before the advent of the eCommerce industry, customers had to visit several places to fulfill their demands. The development of the eCommerce industry changed the way people exchanged services across the world.

Along with the Internet came infrastructures that enabled the on demand purchase of items. Due to the cost of the infrastructure required to run eCommerce companies, it is not unsurprising that few companies have risen to control the major share of the market. These include companies like Amazon and eBay. Due to the kind of influence they possess, they dominate over service providers, whether large or small. These companies decide what to stock. They also determine how to market these stocks.

Invariably, they play a huge role in what users eventually buy. What this means is that service provision now occurs at a higher cost and with a lesser degree of freedom of choice. This is because companies pass on the cost of their operations to consumers and decide what is best to sell.

In such cases where these eCommerce companies spend a lot on promotion, such cost will eventually be passed to the consumer. Giving service providers more liberty to explore the eCommerce space and providing them with the right access to technical support required to fulfil their orders can sufficiently cut down on price of services. Thus, it has become easier than ever for micro and small businesses to distribute to buyers. Fulfillment centers are no longer table stakes for retailers. This is being enabled by several key trends. The need to give more control to users and service providers has been a great motivation for decentralization of the eCommerce industry. Before the blockchain technology became topical, there were a number of attempts to decentralize the eCommerce industry. However, the only thing that changed was the degree of centralization. Amazon, for example, runs a more centralized eCommerce platform than eBay. Although eBay as a promoter of peer to peer commerce allows buyers and sellers to connectand make transactions, it still dictates the governance of those platforms.

Platforms are based on network effects, which initially puts power in the hand of the community. However, when such communities grow and it becomes difficult for individual members to pull away, the creator of that community takes the center stage again and dictates the governance of that community. The nature of peer to peer transactions is the ability to keep such transactions out of the reach of third parties. In the traditional eCommerce model, transactions are conducted in centralized markets.

Agorz is built on the premise of enabling service providers and consumers to capture more value between them. A blockchain based platform will enable consumers’ access services across different service providers from a single interface, while service providers can ensure proper service delivery while brokering new contracts. Consumers can make smarter decisions based on the information about the supplier, product, and delivery conditions.

The growth and rising adoption of the blockchain technology makes this an important consideration. Since the advent of the Internet and first online value exchange in the early 1990s, the online retail industry has grown into a 2 trillion dollar market. Although most consumers carry out their online retailing activities via desktop computers, the use of smartphones is catching up as well. About 2 billion of the world’s population has access to a smartphone. The size of the eCommerce industry continues to expand, and the market is expected to hover around 4 trillion at the end of this decade.