A Reliable E-commerce Business Model Using Blockchain Based Product Grading System

Abstract

The first step in online shopping is, apparently, to choose a reliable supplier. However, consumers and merchants may have different perceptions of product quality, and this may result in business disputes. The dispute about buying inferior goods may be caused from simple product photos or merchants make over the top claims about their products. This dispute problem cannot be resolved completely, even though customers choose reputable e-commerce companies, e.g., Amazon.com and Alibaba.com. In the final analysis, the cause is that e-commerce companies do not adopt quality rating to evaluate products. If there is an alliance, among e-commerce companies and trusted organizations, which establishes credible product grading system (PGS), online shoppers may buy genuine product at a fair price from this e-commerce alliance. In this paper, we propose blockchain based PGS (BPGS) to deal with big data for this business model. The blockchain is a decentralized technology, and thus we can speed up the verification of product grading. In addition, for the proposed BPGS, 51% of attacks cannot be completed unless 51% of merchants and e-commerce companies in this alliance are simultaneously compromised. Therefore, our ecommerce environment based on BPGS is not only reliable but also secure.