Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are still controversial. Some perceive them as purely speculative instruments able to feed financial bubbles that will eventually burst and leave many people in tears and companies in shambles. However, those are only special cases of a blockchain, a technology that will soon (if not already) benefit from a consensus regarding its disruption power that will reshape entire industries and their underpinning economic models.
In the area of logistics and trade, it is increasingly clear that any tracking system will be blockchain-driven in the coming decade.
In the area of logistics and trade, it is increasingly clear that any tracking system will be blockchain-driven in the coming decade. This applies to tracking used in the freight industry to B2C e-commerce delivered at home. A number of blockchain-driven tracking solutions are progressively appearing yet this is just the beginning. Tracking, as it was built in the past, suffers from a major drawback: the lack of a single source of truth in a world of increasingly complex supply chains.
While millions of e-shoppers have already been complaining about delivery failure issues, tracking can barely provide an answer to the following question: who was responsible for my delivery problem? It’s not uncommon for e-shoppers to get contradictory answers from e-tailers or platforms on the one hand, and postal and logistics companies on the other hand, without even mentioning a possible involvement of customs authorities. All in all, it’s very difficult, if not impossible today, to have a true visibility on the party (or the parties) that truly failed in handling an online order delivery. As a result, the very trust in the e-commerce ecosystem is being undermined.
The current visibility provided by today’s tracking solutions does not shed any light on the reasons for failed or delayed deliveries. E-shoppers must guess what is going on at best. There is no immutable records on “who did what” between the time of online purchase and final delivery. Every party, form e-sellers providing their products to platforms who are then contracting postal and logistics providers, has different views of what is actually happening with an e-shopper’s order. There is no single source of truth that will facilitate communication with e-shoppers and between the different companies and networks involved in a transaction.
A solution from the past would have consisted in trying to create a trusted third party able to gather data and information about an online order from purchase to delivery and made sure that critical data was then shared in a secured and safe way between all the abovementioned stakeholders. Unfortunately, a consensus on the way to proceed and unite the different parties to an e-commerce transaction was never achieved. And this trusted third party does not exist as of today.
With blockchain technologies, the creation of centralized trusted third party is not required anymore.
With blockchain technologies, the creation of this centralized trusted third party is not required anymore. By construction, blockchain technologies can enable that each participant in such a system (or node in the business network) benefit from an immutable copy of what truly happened to an online order from purchase to delivery. As a result, there is no single source of system failure given that the sales and tracking records are decentralized and available on multiple machines simultaneously. In these conditions, all parties could safely benefit from a single source of truth whenever a dispute would be open between them. E-shoppers could further trust delivery providers, e-sellers and platforms and get consistent customer service answers from one or the other. The single source of truth would become the single source of trust in an ever-thriving e-commerce ecosystem.