This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: CS-Cart and Omnitude announce blockchain solution to improve trust and convenience in e-commerce.
Omnitude, the British blockchain middleware platform, has partnered with multi-vendor e-commerce platform CS-Cart to build innovative single identity capabilities into the retail experience using blockchain.
CS-Cart powers more than 35,000 websites worldwide, where multiple vendors can sell their goods through a single marketplace. Omnitude ID (OID) technology will be natively integrated into its software, providing high levels of trust and convenience and helping to reduce the risk of fraud. The solution will be launched within Q2 of 2019, bringing benefits to vendors and customers in 172 countries. CS-Cart will be the first platform in its class to integrate blockchain into its core processes.
CS-Cart provides merchants a rich toolset with which to build online marketplaces out of the box, including support for 70 popular payment services such as PayPal, Authorize.Net, First Data, 2Checkout and SagePay. It also integrates with eight of the world's most trusted couriers including USPS, DHL, FedEx, and UPS. CS-Cart will use OID to provide a revolutionary way for vendors and customers to sign-in and verify their identity. This has several significant benefits for both the vendor and their customers that begin with the e-commerce process, but can extend throughout the supply chain.
"We have always strived to make the CS-Cart platform as easy and flexible as possible for businesses to deploy and start trading. Blockchain has very real benefits for customers and vendors that cannot be ignored, and we are looking forward to demonstrating how this new level of trust will improve people's lives through our implementation with Omnitude ID," said Vladimir Kalynyak, co-founder of CS-Cart and Omnitude.
Customers with an existing OID will only need to enter their identity and preferences once, then each time they transact with a vendor they will be able to use the identity and preference information already stored in the blockchain. As organisations rethink their data governance in light of GDPR and consumer's expectations, customers will also be able to control their data and its visibility to vendors on a case-by-case basis. This approach puts them in control of their data and digital identity.
Eliminating fake product or vendor reviews is another key area where OID will be used. CS-Cart users will be able to protect their vendors from defamation and their customers from misleading reviews by only enabling those customers with Proof of Interaction (POI) with the vendor to post reviews.
The same principles can also be applied to loyalty programmes, where the customer will have the convenience of checking out using their single sign-on ID, while the merchant is able to avoid misuse of points and verify the identity of the customer data collected.
Future plans include applying the Omnitude blockchain platform to allow tracking - automatically and objectively - of goods throughout an OID-powered supply chain. For example, verifying whether goods are shipped promptly, and whether payments are made on time and in full.
Ultimately, the partnership also holds the potential to help merchants to reduce fraud and improve the efficiency of their affiliate programmes. For example, they can require a pre-agreed minimum level of interaction with the customer that is tracked using a permissioned blockchain ledger and OID.
OID is a single identity solution the builds on top of the Hyperledger project permissioned and scalable blockchain implementation, and is designed to integrate with the enterprise technologies that are in use throughout established businesses today. E-commerce is one use case where customers and merchants will see an immediate benefit of increased trust and convenience. OID also has advantages for data governance, provenance, transport infrastructure and supply chains, which are currently being explored.
Add a Comment
No messages on this article yet