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Trust: a vital issue for marketplaces

The success of marketplaces is based on a simple principle: connecting sellers and buyers seamlessly. But behind this promise lies a persistent challenge: trust. Counterfeit products, fake customer reviews, uncertainty about provenance and late payments still too often undermine the experience.
In this context, blockchain appears to be a technology capable of enhancing transparency and restoring trust in the long term. Far from being reserved for cryptocurrencies, it offers concrete and powerful applications for e-commerce.

Blockchain, in simple terms

Often perceived as complex, blockchain can be summarised as follows: a digital ledger shared between several parties, which is tamper-proof and accessible with complete transparency. Each new piece of data entered (transaction, certification, review, etc.) is time-stamped and cannot be modified retrospectively.
Its main characteristics – security, traceability, immutability – make it a relevant lever for environments where trust is central… such as marketplaces.

Practical uses for marketplaces

1. Ensuring product traceability

In sectors such as agri-food, fashion and cosmetics, consumers demand to know where products come from and how they were manufactured. Thanks to blockchain, each stage – from production to delivery – can be recorded and consulted. This gives buyers access to a ‘digital passport’ for their product.

2. Combating counterfeiting

Marketplaces are regularly confronted with the sale of counterfeit products. By associating a unique blockchain certificate with each item, it becomes possible to instantly verify its authenticity. For brands, this is a way to protect their image; for customers, it is a guarantee of trust.

3. Making customer reviews tamper-proof

Online reviews strongly influence purchasing decisions… but their reliability is often questioned. By recording reviews on a blockchain, we can ensure that they come from real buyers and have not been manipulated.

4. Securing payments with smart contracts

Smart contracts automate certain critical steps. For example, payment can be blocked until the customer confirms receipt of the product. The result: fewer disputes and greater peace of mind for all parties.

Benefits for all parties involved

• For buyers: transparency regarding product origin, verified reviews, secure transactions.
• For sellers: promotion of quality, reduction in disputes, improved customer relations.
• For marketplace operators: a unique market positioning, an image of reliability and increased appeal to reputable sellers.

Challenges to overcome

The promise is appealing, but it is not all plain sailing. Setting up a blockchain infrastructure represents a significant investment, both financially and technically. Some public blockchains still suffer from slowness and scalability issues.

Added to this is the need for education: many customers do not yet have a clear understanding of blockchain, which means that efforts must be made to explain it in layman’s terms in order to build trust. Finally, regulatory aspects, particularly in Europe with the GDPR and the future MiCA regulation, will have to be incorporated into any initiative.

Towards next-generation marketplaces

If these challenges are met, marketplaces could transform into truly trustworthy ecosystems. Each product will have its own unique digital identity, each transaction will be secure, and each review will be verifiable.

Blockchain does not replace marketplaces: it strengthens them. It paves the way for a new generation of platforms, where transparency and reliability become major competitive advantages.

Blockchain has the potential to revolutionise the way marketplaces operate. By providing traceability, security and transparency, it directly meets consumer expectations and seller needs.

More than a technological innovation, it is a strategic tool for building trust – that rare resource that drives growth and loyalty in e-commerce.

Tomorrow, in the era of Web3, marketplaces that know how to take advantage of blockchain could well become the leaders of a new standard: that of total transparency.

Have you heard of generative AI? For the past few months, this branch of artificial intelligence has known growing success brought on by the advent of such tools as ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Midjourney.

These tools seem to breed innovation as much as controversy and generative AI is well on its way to disrupting long-established industries.

The e-commerce sector, in particular, will experience profound changes due to this new form of artificial intelligence. In this article, we’ll touch upon the concept of generative AI and the functionalities that could help online retailers boost their sales.

What is Generative AI ?

Generative AI – also known as GenAI – is an artificial intelligence system capable of creating content from data models. This content can take many forms, including text, images, video, or any other media.

In recent months, several startups have garnered attention, sometimes for their innovative products and other times for the stratospheric amounts they have raised or because of the controversy they have stirred up. Some of these startups include:

• OpenAI, the entity behind ChatGPT and Dall-E, which raised €175 million last May
• MidJourney, creator of the eponymous tool MidJourney
• Google – bolstered by the phenomenal success of ChatGPT – which very recently created Bard

How does Generative AI actually work ? 

So, how does generative AI operate in practice? How can you put it to work in your company or use it for a given project?

It all starts with a query – also known as a prompt – formulated by the user in the form of a question or command for the generative AI. The AI generator has undergone training and has been exposed to extensive amounts of data.

It then uses these data sets and its artificial neural networks to provide an original response.

Record-Breaking Mass Adoption

The massive adoption of AI is puzzling many experts around the world. ChatGPT, for example, reached the 100 million user mark in just 2 months. Comparatively, it took 9 months for TikTok to achieve similar numbers and 24 months for Instagram.

What’s clear is that the more consumers choose to embrace these tools, the more companies will offer generative AI-based services.

Where does e-commerce come in ?

We’re getting there! Generative AI models have disrupted many sectors and hold the promise of tremendous technological advances. E-commerce is, without a doubt, one of the sectors that will be closely affected by these innovations. Here are 5 examples of how generative AI could be relevant to e-commerce.

1. AI Generators for products recommendations 

Among the functionalities an AI generator can provide to address the challenges of e-commerce and marketplaces, product recommendation generation turns out to be the most promising.

This type of technology makes it possible to create a personalized browsing path for each customer or prospect based on their preferences previously identified by the algorithms. Generative AI can be a differentiating asset in the context of loyalty strategies as it provides a deeper understanding of consumer habits.

Customer data is at the heart of strategic stakes for most online merchants. Unfortunately, many don’t know how to take full advantage of it or don’t have the resources to do so. AI generators, on the other hand, are capable of processing a huge amount of data in very little time. This allows them to identify product trends and showcase certain items accordingly.

That said, utilizing generative AI shouldn’t make us lose sight of legal regulations concerning the use of personal data. In the European Union – and some other regions – users give their consent to have their behavior analyzed by accepting the presence of cookies on websites. In principle, no AI-based marketplace is exempt.

2. AI-Generated product descriptions

Product descriptions are a form of text-based content designed to enhance the user experience (UX) and improve the product page’s search engine optimization (SEO), ensuring its visibility in search engine results.

When managing a very large number of items, this kind of task can quickly become tedious.

The natural language processing abilities of generative AI make it possible to produce natural language content by analyzing product data. AI generators are especially well-suited to this type of task since product descriptions always tend to follow the same structure:

• General characteristics of the product. 
• Its benefits. 
• Its specificities. 

Thus, depending on the type of products the online retailer offers, the components of a textual product description can be essentially the same. For instance, a store that sells furniture and home decor will always include information about the dimensions of the products, which AI is fully capable of understanding through data analysis.

For example, Phrasee is a platform dedicated to product description generation for e-commerce players. It relies on generative AI to come up with original product descriptions.

3. AI Image Generators

One of the downsides of e-commerce is the inability to interact with the products physically. This means product images are crucial for triggering purchases. For online shop owners who need to process many items, taking pictures and editing images can be time-consuming and costly. Using pictures created by an AI image generator thus becomes a compelling alternative to help renew the presentation of products on a website.

Based on generative adversarial networks (GAN), product image generation uses a technology that employs pictures of existing products, which the algorithm analyzes repeatedly until it becomes capable of developing substantially similar content.

Among the tools that can be utilized to generate product images, DALL-E 2 – mentioned earlier – deserves the spotlight. This easy-to-use generative AI has already conquered the field of advertising and is now making progress in the e-commerce sector.

With that said, despite the performance of generative AI platforms dedicated to product images, this application isn’t yet suited to all types of retailers. For the sake of the brands’ credibility in the eyes of their customers, the authenticity of the images remains crucial.

4. Building close relationships with customers

Chatbots – or conversational agents – can provide real-time assistance for the users by answering generic questions. This does away with the last remaining barriers to purchase and is an effective way to improve the conversion rate of e-commerce websites.

5. Fine-tuning internal search engines 

Users rely on marketplace search engines extensively. This means they expect clear, swift responses and a selection of products that match their original search intent. 

Thanks to generative AI, search engines will continue to become increasingly powerful as time goes on. Retail giants such as Amazon are fully aware of the potential and seek to incorporate these improvements right into their applications. In the United States, 56% (1) of product searches begin on the American marketplace.

However, Generative AI raises many controversial issues

We can’t mention generative Artificial Intelligence without addressing a few areas of concern. As innovative as AI generators may be, it should be noted that they will not replace the cognitive abilities of human beings, at least not in the short term.

Instances of inaccurate information

Generative AIs such as ChatGPT sometimes offer erroneous information, and generative AI models are still in their learning phase. We believe generative AI can be a complementary tool to human intelligence, but it is still far from being able to replace it altogether (thankfully!). If you want high-quality content, be circumspect about the raw information these tools provide. We recommend you always double-check it thoroughly.

What about our personal data ? 

When we converse with a chatbot online, we may be in a position to give out some of our personal information. This data is collected and stored by the conversational agent. That’s when it can get difficult to get it back if we no longer want it to be used or if we are worried about it being sold to third parties.

As you may have gathered, generative Artificial Intelligence is opening up a whole world of possibilities in various sectors as consumers continue to embrace it.

E-commerce is one of the areas where its hold is already tangible and where it will keep on increasing in the years to come.

These AIs can be tremendous business drivers and offer significant time savings. However, the limitations of AI systems – still in their learning phase – and their propensity to sometimes deliver inaccurate or incomplete information should not be ignored.

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Sources

(1) “Every single” Amazon team is working on generative AI, The Verge, 2023

There’s been a real shift this year: the volume of online retail in B2B has exceeded that of B2C (Gartner). And this trend is likely to intensify thanks to marketplaces, which represent the best driver of sales among professionals: 70% of new marketplaces in the coming years will focus on B2B!

Digital retail in B2B in 2022 will be worth some $7 billion (Frost & Sullivan). If this incredible sum doesn’t grab your attention, it’s equivalent to +20% (19.6%, to be precise) and equates to the increase in online B2B sales in the first quarter of 2022 in France. B2C, meanwhile, is standing still, with a drop of 15% (Fevad).

The marketplace model provides companies with new opportunities. This “revolution” is happening gradually: professionals are slowly embracing this solution. They’re not used to working in this way, even though they already make a significant number of their personal purchases on marketplaces. It also takes time for a company to internally approve a change on this scale.

Changing habits

Launching a marketplace means embarking on a new way of managing a market; to do this, a company needs to adapt the way in which it works. You will probably need to review your stock and catalog management with the (virtuous) aim of automating them.

For instance, Alstom worked with IZBERG to launch StationOne, the first marketplace for railway operators. Wheels, bearings, motors, suspensions, cables, screws, cameras, personal protective equipment: StationOne provides all the necessary material for maintenance, installation, repairs, servicing and even training. The site streamlines the supply chain by working directly with a wide range of suppliers and by facilitating the identification of parts, the ordering process and the organization of deliveries.

Total provides us with another example: Click & Buy is an internal marketplace, which facilitates invoicing, especially for small amounts (C-class purchases). The main benefits for the group: faster processing times and time savings for its employees.

In addition to spare parts and invoices, you can also “trade” events online, as GRDF has done with its service marketplace, known as Dej’Tour’. The site encourages all group employees to sign up for internal lunches and discussions throughout the year.

Developing a service offering

Developing a B2B marketplace is also an opportunity to consider the specificities of the market and to demonstrate that you can respond to them with a real sense of service. Your professional clients have needs that don’t exist in B2C: quote management and deferred payment methods (credit, leasing with the option to purchase, long-term leasing, credit insurance, etc.), along with automatic invoicing and batch delivery management. A marketplace makes it possible for you to do this, while also offering a range of additional functionalities: from a deferred payment solution to the use of a virtual IBAN to limit the risk of any errors with manual entry.

The model also facilitates the management of access and rights (including approval by the ordering party, for instance) because in B2B, the person who’s buying isn’t necessarily the person who’s paying! Lastly, your site can support your company’s international expansion by automating the choice of language and compliance with local regulations.

Expanding the target market

Who wouldn’t want to reach new clients by launching on new markets that have previously been limited in scope?

Launched by IZBERG in 2017, Suez’s Organix marketplace connects sellers of organic waste (fruit, oil, sugar, lactose, etc.) with biogas plants with the aim of transforming this waste into energy.

It’s a win-win for all the project’s stakeholders. This reduces waste, protects the environment, creates a new business and opens up the market to all, overcoming an “ultra-local” issue that was previously resolved solely by word of mouth. The Organix marketplace already has 200 sellers and 140 buyers and more than 300 tons of waste have been sold online. 

In addition to providing an opportunity to develop a new business model, a marketplace makes it possible to: 

• launch an additional offering, as we are increasingly seeing in the health sector. Major financial organizations are creating marketplaces that offer the leasing or purchase of medical equipment for professionals; the purchase process includes financing options, whether for long-term leasing or leasing with the option to purchase.
• firmly establish a business within the circular economy by refurbishing and reusing. There are many examples of this, including Backacia, Cycle Up, Waste and BeeWee, which works to give industrial spare parts a new lease of life.
  

A marketplace project is more business-focused than technological. That’s why IZBERG supports its clients during the early strategic analysis phase: this is a vital process to identify and prioritize the functionalities to be included in your platform’s store front.