Conceptualizing a Marketplace Ecosystem Using Only Blockchain Products
By: Kirill Shilov
Tags: Payments, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Education

Modern businesses have to be more competitive than ever before if they want to succeed. The Internet has forever changed the way business is being conducted, and those companies that refuse to adapt to these changes will be left behind. It’s always obvious to look back to the past and see what technologies were essential for businesses to succeed, but looking to the future can be a bit more tricky.

Could the Blockchain become an essential part of business management tools?

What’s certain is that the blockchain is here to stay, and its permanence only increases when large companies add the blockchain to their roster of technologies. Facebook, for instance, recently announced launching its own cryptocurrency, Libra, in conjunction with 25+ other huge companies (Lyft, Visa, Paypal, etc).

Libra will offer a conglomerate of features on a blockchain, similar to the Chinese company WeChat, which already has over a billion downloads. The bottom line is that the blockchain is becoming essential for every business, so let’s take a look at how you can implement it into yours right now.

Essential Tools for Businesses in 2019 and Beyond

You don’t have time to sift through every single tool, list, and recommendation to see what works best for you. You’re busy, we get it. With this in mind, we humbly present a quick list of the six most essential tools to help grow your business and we will be comparing a traditional option to its blockchain counterpart.

We’ve chosen to use Sessia for our blockchain counterpart examples, because it combines essential tools with ease of use for free.

Online Payments

You can’t conduct business without accepting payments. Sure, it would be great if you could accept cash for every purchase to lower fees, but with the growth of online sales it would be silly to ignore that vector. Studies show that the younger generations are more welcoming of cryptocurrencies, which may be the key to future online sales.

SessiaPay is like Paypal on Blockchain. SessiaPay interlinks itself with its wallet and accepts cryptocurrencies as a payment for client orders within its marketplace.

It is free for businesses to use and can accept international payments, ETH, and KICKs (their native cryptocurrency).

E-commerce Website

Unless you are comfortable designing websites, creating your own e-commerce website will be far from easy. The alternatives to coding your own platform are solutions like Shopify that make launching your online store a relative breeze.

Where some users may struggle, however, is in figuring out how to connect everything together: website, sales funnels, mobile access, and how to reward their customers.

On the Blockchain side, Sessia Online Store Builder can relieve a lot of the headache. Like in Shopify, even inexperienced users can create a free e-store via a browser or on mobile. Building via Mobile goes one step ahead and combines with the SessiaMarket, giving you the ability to choose between three levels of cashback commission rewards for your customers.

Cashback/Reward Systems

Traditional cashback reward systems have proved to be a hit with the customers in marketplaces but, the reality is that your information is being sold without you being appropriately rewarded.

The Blockchain has the ability to help rectify this malaise and usher us towards greater data privacy and security.

For a simpler, consolidated, and immutable experience where everyone is rewarded fairly, Blockchain products such as Pei and Loyyal offer solutions by building on top of the already existing reward systems. The loyalty program gives its users a way to earn rewards with any purchase that is made through a referral (like your friend posting a receipt from a store, you clicking on it, and subsequently making a purchase).

Rewards are given both ways: the referrer gets a cashback incentive while the referee earns a kickback.

CRM Systems

After you start to accrue a decent customer base, it is important to know how to manage them appropriately. Some of the best CRM systems pull tons of seemingly disconnected data and combines it to create opportunities for businesses to increase sales. HubSpot CRM, Salesforce CRM, and Freshsales are all companies that do this in traditional markets. Sessia has a similar feature to incorporate CRM data within their business app. Businesses can find detailed statistics on everything from sales to turnover rates, order quantities, customer purchase history, periods of activity versus inactivity, and much more.

HubSpot CRM and its competitors are wonderful, but they also fall short because they can be costly and don’t reward the customer directly. In addition, they tend to rely on a customer’s use of many different platforms (social media, email, website browsings, etc.).

Everything a business needs can be found under the “Reports” section, and all of this data can be used to create a full picture of a specific customer’s experience, in turn, helping create a better experience for that customer to further encourage them to make purchases.

Logistics Management

Any business that ships anything, whether it be something as large as a piece of furniture or something as small as earrings, has to deal with logistics management. Companies like Etsy, Ebay, and Amazon already have a complex process in place to handle their daily thousands of orders. Amazon goes even further, outsourcing its shipping service, known as Fulfilment.

While many small businesses manage their logistics by hand, printing their own shipping labels and manually tracking each one to ensure it reaches its final destination, they now have these third-party alternatives.

Anyway, it comes with fees and the responsibility of the business owner to check yet another inbox for customer messages multiple times a day. That’s where blockchain can remove the hustle and costs.

As seen in SessiaLogistics, as a business, you can integrate API logistics data from outside sources. So, when a customer reaches out you’ll be able to easily see their order history, logistics details, and even check out their CRM reports to see if you’ve had problems with them in the past.

Simplicity is the Key to Success

When it comes to your business, the less you have to worry about the more successful you can be. When you aren’t wasting your time checking 15 different inboxes and applications, responding to messages on five different platforms, and wondering if your sales growth is hitting the mark, you can finally focus on improving your product.

An all-in-one integrated solution not only that it saves you time but now it exposes your business to a new audience which is growing as fast as the cryptocurrency market. Using blockchain-based tools helps you expand your knowledge on this revolutionary technology.

After all, the more you invest in the future, the more you can ultimately improve your business.