Elementh, the best news to the trillion dollar eCommerce industry!

Meet my friend Kennedy, he is 27 years old now, 6 years ago when he came to the university he was much more younger and vibrant. Kennedy likes fashion and consumer electronics, but the funny thing is that he does not know much about online stuff. Believe it or yes, Kennedy has no Facebook account and he only got his gmail account when he needed it to fill school forms.

When you see Kennedy at first you would be forced to imagine he is the guy of social media because of his attention to details when it comes to his taste of fashion. Unfortunately he is allergic to pictures and when you want to take a picture of him he will be like;

_{Image source}

In 2015, Kennedy saw a shoe that caught his interest, he wanted to get one for himself and being an offline kind of a person, Ken checked almost every major store in town in search of this Louis vuitton shoe but to no avail. He even called his friends outside of Tamale to search for this very shoe for him but all his efforts proved futile.

_{Image source}

He was growing desperate now because that was the nature of Ken, one can say he is a jonkey of fashion. I did not like my friend in that situation so I decided to search online for this very shoe and there it was at a price that shocked me. I had anticipated that it would cost a lot more than it was on the website. I showed this to Ken and he was happy and sad at the same time. Ken did not really trust anything online like I did so even though the price was within his budget he was not sure it would be a fruitful deal.

But one thing was certain, Ken trusted me, I knew I could use this to get him to try something new. I told him fashion products are often this cheap online and if he could use them he would save money. Finally, he agreed to try for the first time. He gave me his loaded visa credit card to do the transaction.

I log on with him watching and we selected his size, color and everything else. Ken was anxious for the product so we opted for the site's expedited transport service which was much more expensive. Immediately after the purchase we were called and assured of the delivery time and date.

Ken was happy the way it all penned out. He didn't think an online transaction could be this easy and straight forward.
3 days later according to the delivery terms Ken received a call to come to a small office down town and claim his shoes. I was with him that day, we went for it and it was well packaged. We both were so happy and Ken was now showing more interest in learning about these online systems.

We got home and was so anxious to open the package. But the news was not great, the shoe was completely a counterfeit of the original shoe ken had seen. As I said, Ken was a guy who paid attention to detail when it came to fashion so he could not miss this, as soon as he saw it his face changed. At that time I had not yet noticed it was fake so I was just still all smiley.
_{For some reason I chose to withhold the name of this website I saw the shoes on, this is because it probably could have been just this onetime mess and a mention of their name could deter people from using the said platform.}

Ken looked at me with a grin face and said "this is completely fake". I was left disappointed, shocked and confused. I trusted that market place but this was certainly far below standards and my reputation was at stake here. I suggested we send it back for refund but the agent told us that was not possible. We launched a conflict resolution on their site but they had already paid the seller off and even though this left a bad rating for the seller, we did not get our money back.
Ken never wore the shoe and he had vowed never to deal with any online store again. He was so visibly pissed but what could I do then.
I soaked the shame and even though I knew that this might have been a one-time error, I could not go about saying that to Ken. This was how the story ended and up till now Ken still hates online stores.

He recently had a wedding and I bought a suit for him from online. He liked it but it never changed his mind about online market places. His first experience was just too bitter.

---

The problem of counterfeit products only gets bigger and bigger by the day. I have seen a lot of disturbing statistics about counterfeit which has great consequences on the economy. It affects mostly the the end user who is often left helpless, I have often wondered how this could be solved in a sustainable way. Do not think that this problem is with the smaller online market places;

Last month Apple (AAPL) ran a sting operation against Amazon.com (AMZN). Apple’s investigators ordered iPhone cords and other accessories that were portrayed as genuine Apple products.
Their finding: Nearly 90% of alleged Apple accessories were counterfeit—not made by Apple at all. They were labeled Apple. They looked like Apple products. People paid Apple-like premium prices for them. But they were fake.
Most of the fakes traced back to Mobile Star LLC, a small New Jersey company. Amazon stopped selling them, but no one knows how many more are floating around, possibly for sale elsewhere.

_{This is from a report published on Forbes by Patrick W. Watson on Nov 2016.}

I was often thinking of how this growing canker could be solved in a sustainable way and this morning when I saw the white paper of Elementh through their sponsored contest with @originalworks I knew they were the answer.

It is as though I was already waiting to see something like this innovation in the marketplace environment. I am passionate about this because I want to build a big market place based in Africa in the near future and my teem have been considering how to face the problem of lack of trust. Last week I was just asking one of my friends why blockchain technology has not been used in the eCommerce industry yet and he suggested that I should think of ways in which it could be use. Hardly could I have thought of it as the team from Elementh did.

_{Image source ||This is the schematic diagram of the root of the Elementh blockchain relying on the power of smart contracts to change the definition for escrow services}

Now let's see how Elementh would change the entire eCommerce space with their innovation using my friend Kennedy's story as guide.

First of all the biggest issue facing the growth the eCommerce space is trust. This is made even much more difficult with the uprising of internet fraud and things like that. This is particularly a bigger problem in the developing world such as Africa. Resources are already scarce hence people cannot just afford to take the risk of sending in money before seeing the product. This led to a widespread demand for pay on delivery system which has almost collapsed so many eCommerce companies because it is not sustainable.
With a system like Elementh in place not only does it solve the problem of trusts, it also bridges the gab between online and offline trad.
If Ken had gone to buy the shoe offline he would have checked the genuineness of the product based on visuals. Now if Ken was using the Elementh blockchain he only had to check the product ID for its genuineness in a way that is completely foolproof.

Elementh also provides a tools that would enable developers to build DAPPs on top of the platform and according the the team,

The number of potential application that can be built on the Elementhplatform are endless. Using the built-in programming language programmers could access tools that will allow them to use:

• Decentralized marketplaces
• Product Tracking
• Seller/Buyer Scoring
• Finding the Lowest Prices
• Product Availability
• Product Locations

This only gets better.
It means aside the fact that Elementh would bring complete trust into the eCommerce space, they also would give developers an opportunity to utilize these tools for free to build cutting edge market places that would hitherto have taken ages to develop. Can you imagine a decentralized market place and how it would operate? Well don't boarder, soon you will see lots of them with the inception of Elementh

One of the most important solution this innovation brings is inventory management. Inventory management is arguably the single most challenging aspect of any business. This cost and attention needed for inventory often leaves lots of companies just doing something to go by.

This often ends up increasing their cost of inventory. It is estimated that each year, companies spend about 25 to 35 per cent of their operational budget on inventory alone. Research has also shown that business with poor inventory strategies spend much more on inventory than the average business leading to smaller profit margins and greater chances of bankruptcy.

I can only imagine how the cutting edge inventory system backed by blockchain technology which is free to use would change the eCommerce industry. With all this chunk of money companies spend on inventory which would be saved with even much better system, businesses are open to a new range of great possibilities.
Companies can use the extra budget saved to improve product quality as well as reducing the cost to the consumer.

Elementh is the answer to so many questions of the eCommerce industry and at this point I'm overwhelmed myself when I realised the opportunity this would bring to this trillion dollar industry. The prospects are so high and I can't wait to see a future with Elementh at its best adoption rate.
I am glad to have been the bearer of good news for this innovation and if I am placed even at 36th position in this contest , it means there are 35 people who did a better job of getting the information out and so it will still be a win for me. Thanks for your attention and to check them out, it is indeed a great innovation.
Useful links:
Elementh Website
Elementh WhitePaper
Elementh Facebook
Elementh Twitter
Elementh Youtube

elementh2018