7. Chapter 7: Conclusion
7.2. Key Findings
7.2.1. RQ1: What factors will influence the adoption of Blockchain technology
The volume of ecommerce transactions continues to increase and create demand for the fast delivery of goods and products. With today’s model of ecommerce domain, this seems extremely hard to accomplish given the weak visibility and authenticity practices in the various stages. As discussed thoroughly in chapter 2, there were several factors that influence the adoption of blockchain technology in the ecommerce domain. These factors include providing visibility across concerned parties while ensuring adequate security to improve the speed of trade activities in a flexible and scalable manner.
Blockchain technology can contribute to providing cost-effective solutions for different types of industries (Petersson and Baur, 2018). Blockchain applications demonstrate a promising opportunity for improving processes and practices in the global trade supply chain and ecommerce fields. The trade supply chains are facing major fundamental challenges namely; data visibility, process optimization and demand management (Godbole n.d.).
According to Belu (2019), the application of blockchain technology in the field of international trade can contribute to reducing costs, providing more transparency and
125 security and easier control and flow of goods among others. This highlights blockchain as a promising technology in trade supply chain that can improve global trade. This technology promotes unique feature such as immutability, and trust and transparency, thereby transforming the international trade sector.
Blockchain in international trade can be applied in supply chain and logistics in order to improve global trade practices. Blockchain application is a new way of organizing and controlling trade value chain and import and export operations (Belu 2019). In addition, blockchain technology also contributes to improving the global trade supply chain by making it more transparent. According to Norberg (2019, p. 4), “Blockchain will decrease the costs of trade, which will empower globalization, trade, and optimize the global value chains that the ICT revolution has made possible”. As explained by the same author, the application of blockchain in trade supply chain allows for improving agreements that are already in place and supporting the underlying characteristics of modern trade agreements.
The adoption of blockchain technology in the global trade supply chain enables new levels of trust, transparency and accountability towards revolutionizing and reinventing international trade. Similarly, Cole, Stevenson and Aitken (2019) asserted that the adoption of blockchain technology in supply chain management perspective presents opportunities for enhancing product safety and security, improving quality management, reducing counterfeiting and improving the sustainability of supply chain management. This suggests that embracing Blockchain in supply chain management can help transform the global nature of supply chains.
In ecommerce, blockchain technology presents promising opportunities towards improving scalability and addressing performance issues (Lim et al. 2019). As the
126 scalability of ecommerce continues to increase, blockchain technology contributes to optimizing business processes, reducing operating costs and improving efficiency of collaboration and interaction (Zhu & Wang 2019). These features state that the application of blockchain technologies can contribute to improving ecommerce.
Blockchain network technique is being integrated in some ecommerce models to enhance consumer to consumer experience (Shorman, Allaymounq & Hamid 2019). This means that Blockchain technology can contribute to enhancing customers’ ecommerce experience through the establishment of trust and credibility. According to Sheikh et al.
(2019, p. 777), blockchain technology provides support to ecommerce platforms to store highly secured data and provided high performance transactional processing. This is a major concern in immutable records for web payments and online processing for orders.
This means that one of the major advantages of Blockchain application in ecommerce is promoting secure transactions particularly during online payments and purchases. As such, Blockchain technology presents opportunities for revolutionizing the traditional ecommerce industry.
7.2.2. RQ2: How can blockchain enhance trade facilitation and compliance in ecommerce trade domain?
As discussed in Chapter 4, a blockchain-based framework was proposed. This framework aimed at streamlining ecommerce trading processes using blockchain technology while ensuring the needs of all concerned parties. The proposed framework will revolutionize the way trade supply chain is handled and create a shift from working in reactive limited visibility to proactive full visibility mode through facilitating access to
127 advance information sharing. This framework will enhance the governance of trade activities and establish a trust level among stakeholders. This framework was developed by adopting the SDLC methodology using the iterative approach.
Many researches in literature investigated the security and scalability challenges in trade supply chain in general and ecommerce in particular. For instance, Feng Tian (2017) adopted blockchain technology in food safety in international trade. In the studies conducted by Toyoda et al. (2017) and Alzahrani and Bulusu (2018), the authors presented a blockchain solution to address the counterfeiting challenges. In addition, Lu and Xu (2017) developed a blockchain-based solution to provide tamper-proof data traceability and regulation validation management system. While, Kamath (2018) examined the idea of tree-to-shelf traceability. In another study, Chen et al. (2017) introduced special and conservative hierarchy for the participating nodes and their role in the blockchain.
Similarly, Xie et al. (2018) proposed a trust framework for ecommerce through the use of blockchain. In another domain, Ying, Jia and Du (2018) presented a use-case study that shows the benefits of using a blockchain ecommerce platform to offer employees flexible benefits. The capabilities of blockchain cover many of the desired techniques needed as part of transforming the trade supply chain; shared ledger capability helps synchronize data among all participating parties, immutability guarantees integrity of data, provenance helps determine origin of goods and products to prevent fraud and establish traceability and smart contracts capability ensures the consensus to establish cross-party workflow. These capabilities give blockchain technology a leading edge over other offerings that do not have these needed capabilities out of the box and will require larger investment.
128 In this study, the proposed blockchain-based framework aimed at optimizing the process of ecommerce trade from customs perspective, and therefore the customs related processes were targeted. The proposed blockchain framework was evaluated using the SUS which shows overall high acceptability levels by all user categories. The proposed solution illustrated how blockchain can cover the factors under consideration, namely integrity, provenance and traceability. This can be complemented with off-chain scientific data mining capabilities for risk and fraud detection to provide the necessary risk detection measures.
This framework introduces many benefits such as reducing the paper dependency and providing a digitized trade platform that guarantees faster to market delivery at reduced cost while ensuring compliance with rules and regulations.
7.2.3. RQ3: Can clustering techniques be used to identify risks in shipments