Retail Analysis
The greatest shift in the history of commerce is coming
Soumaya Hamzaoui, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at RedCloud, explores the shift toward open commerce and how Web3 and decentralised platforms will be integral to the next phase in a user-controlled Internet.
S
ince the dawn of time, global commerce has been linked to economic development. From the
Silk Road, which connected China and the Far East with the Middle East and Europe, to the rise of e-commerce, exchanging one product for another has had an indelible impact on the world. However, our current global
commerce system is broken. In the digital domain, a small handful of tech giants like Amazon and Facebook continue to exert enormous influence on nearly every aspect of the commerce experience, taking all the cake while leaving millions of sellers struggling to survive. Of course, this represents but a tiny fraction of overall
commerce. The vast majority of the world’s population pay for goods locally in stores, served by 500+ million merchants who are entirely reliant upon vast and sprawling supply chains that haven’t changed since the 1970s. As we’ve seen from the recent news agenda, these inefficient, offline and manually driven supply chains are increasingly vulnerable to external pressures. The reason most merchants in emerging economies cannot
trade digitally is because they’re locked out of the financial system – unbanked and forced to carry on using cash; unable to establish a trading profile and thus prevented from borrowing to invest in their businesses.
6 | June 2022 For consumer goods manufacturers,
this is a disaster, because cash is slow moving and expensive to handle. What’s more, without digital trading, they have no way of knowing who their merchants are, what is being sold or who ends up buying it. They’re disconnected from their merchant base by a complex web of distributors and intermediaries. The largest manufacturers simply have to place bets and distribute products according to their best guess. For everyone, these emerging market opportunities remain largely off limits. Profound change is therefore
necessary because the level of inefficiency in our current commerce
ecosystem is unsustainable. We need to fundamentally change the way goods are bought, sold, shipped and distributed around the world. And Open Commerce can help fix this problem.
So what is Open Commerce? Open Commerce is a movement that is built upon the same
principles as the original Open Source movement, which is designed to champion free trade and enact profound, positive change for merchants and retailers of all sizes. It is best understood within the context of an ongoing,
fundamental evolution in the make-up and structure of the Internet – increasingly referred to as Web3.
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