Blockchain contributes to digital retail with security and personalization. Applications on blockchain, so-called Dapps, can serve up personalized offers by analyzing consumers’ previous shopping experience. In addition, consumers can easily get information about a product’s provenance, transparently manage their warranties, and get benefits from their loyalty memberships across retail chains.

In their turn, retailers can either develop their own blockchain-based software or use ready-to-run Dapps. The second option is much more cost-efficient, that’s why most retailers choose to go this way. Here’s the overview of what the Dapp market offers for retailers so far.

Startups Offer Blockchain for Retail

As blockchain penetrates different business domains, startups recognize this technology as promising for retail, too. Some of the most interesting cases are illustrated below.

Shopin Personalizes Shopping

The blockchain-based Shopin was designed to serve consumers with personalized offers from Shopin’s base of retailers by collecting and analyzing data on online shoppers’ behavior.

In addition, consumers signing up to this service can earn special tokens by watching retailers’ ads. For retailers, in their turn, it’s like to pay their customers, instead of Facebook or Google, for the impressions of their personalized ads.

At the moment, Shopin user base exceeds 700,000 customers who already generated $14.7 mln sales, and the volumes keep growing.

Chronicled Fights with Counterfeit Goods

Right now, 2.5% of global retail, or $461 billion in cash, is generated through selling counterfeit products. Chronicled aims to prevent this with the help of blockchain.

The application leverages IoT, blockchain, and AI technologies for tracing the provenance of goods and automating supply chain processes with smart contracts. On the one hand, Chronicled is an open-source environment for developers who’d like to create their own solutions. On the other hand, it is a ready-to-use application to trace product origins and movement, protect brands’ integrity, and automate supply chains.

Warranteer Is On Guard for Warranties

When it comes to warranty management, different challenges come up. To understand that a certain product is still under warranty, a customer should find the bill, check the date of purchase and warranty conditions, and submit the request to the supplier. Only after the retailer checks all the details the customer can get the item fixed or the money back, which may take weeks. Warranteer offers to ease up this process with blockchain 2.0.

The Dapp provides its users with all the necessary functionality to trace and enforce warranties. Once customers buy something, they can simply scan the item and activate the warranty to be stored in the cloud.

qiibee Rewards for Loyalty

Loyal customers generate up to 40% of retail revenues, which became a ground for qiibee to create a solution for managing loyalty programs on blockchain.

qiibee operates as a loyalty-specific platform that provides developers with a toolkit to build their own loyalty management Dapps. For example, retailers can use the platform’s web wallet and token allocation dashboards to craft their own solutions. Superdry, Domino’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Subway are already in for it, with more brands to follow.

Seizing the Opportunity

With the advent of Dapps on the market, blockchain gains traction among different industries. This appeals to those looking to design their own solutions to meet their business needs, and retailers are no exception.

It’s possible to build your own blockchain for this, but there’s a more cost-efficient way to go about this. With pre-designed blockchain ecosystems like genEOS, it’s possible to make use of its out-of-the-box components and massive processing capacity to build scalable Dapps. With their millions of transactions, retail businesses will find the ecosystem especially handy as it charges no transaction fees.

Catching Up Is Easy

To make shopping experiences smoother, more secure and transparent, retailers are looking for the solution in blockchain. One way for them is to first develop their own blockchain and then design a custom Dapp from scratch on top of it. Yet another option, which is more cost-efficient, is to build a Dapp using a ready-to-use blockchain ecosystem like genEOS, for example.

As the bottom line, retailers can increase their revenues through advanced personalization, trackable product provenance that addresses counterfeit manufacturing, speedy warranty management, and easier rewards for loyal customers.

Shopin Personalizes Shopping