ICO Review - 5 reasons why Omnitude Could be a revolution in eCommerce

biomanforcerose (0)(1)in #ico • 6 years ago

Omnitude is a platform that connects blockchain technologies, eCommerce platforms and enterprise systems to build end-to-end supply chains.

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1. A booming sector with big problems

With global sales reaching $1.86 trillion in 2016 and a forecast revenue of $4.48 trillion in 2021, eCommerce is one of the world's largest markets. China and the United States accounted for 69.1% of global eCommerce sales in 2017 and the mobile commerce has been growing steadily the past years. For example, in China, 70% of eCommerce sales are made from a mobile. In the United States, it is at least a third of sales.

In France, the turnover of eCommerce reached 72 billion euros in 2016 (which represents an increase of 14.6% compared to 2015) and more than one in two French people make online purchases.

However, as the eCommerce market grows, some problems become more and more obvious. There are four major problems:

Fraud problems. According to studies, for every $100 spent on eCommerce, 5.65 cents are stolen by fraudsters.
Problems of supply chains. The problems of counterfeiting in the supply chain is a real scourge. Imports of counterfeit goods account for 2.5% of global imports and 86% of retailers say their sales are affected by dummy products.
Identity verification. The efforts made by each marketer to properly store the user data are expensive. In addition, user reviews are becoming more important in the buying process. Except that according to studies, it's estimated to 1/3 the number of false reviews.
High transaction fees. Currently, to collect online payment, merchants are forced to go through payment gateways that charge them a 2.9% fee of the transaction amount.

Omnitude proposes to provide solutions to all these major problems faced by the eCommerce market thanks to its solution based on the blockchain.

2. Positioning of the platform and use of community

The omnitude platform is positioned as a middleware facilitating the connection betwenn existing platforms or systems and the Blockchain. Where many companies strive to impose a radical change of system to companies, Omnitude is positioned as a solution to significantly improve their systems by interfacing with them via connectors and APIs.
This positioning should allow companies to adopt the Omnitude solution very easily, since it will bring value to them without revolutionizing their system or platform.

Furthermore, the team is very open to the community on which Omnitude intends to rely for the development of its platform. The platform will offer applications to solve a number of problems, but it relies on the community to provide its own solutions to particular problems. For this, Omnitude will support the community to develop its own application through open documentation, sample code and support.

3. A complete solution

Omnitude works as a middleware that uses Blockchain technologies to connect to eCommerce platforms or enterprise systems. The solution is built around a series of connectors and APIs that allow the transmission of data between different software platforms and the Blockchain.

Omnitude will rely on Hyperledger, the open source, global and collaborative project hosted by The Linux Foundation. Hyperledger is an authorized blockchain protocol that enables business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions.

The Hyperledger architecture provides basic blockchain services, on which the Omnitude ecosystem is built. The Omnitude ecosystem will be composed of a variety of entities: traders, customers, suppliers, affiliates / referents, ...

The Omnitude platform provides solutions to the main problems currently facing the eCommerce market:

The anti-fraud solution: Omnitude's two services, Single Identity and Single Reputation, enable merchants to combat identity theft, which is the most common fraud. In addition to this, the use of the Blockchain will allow merchants to free themselves from their obligation to securely store users' personal data. Which will limit the risk of hack.

Supply Chain Solution: Omnitude's Supply Chain solution tracks individual items or shipments (raw materials, components, assembled or finished products, etc.) tagged with identifiers throughout the entire supply chain to the final delivery. Crossing the supply chain, the object will go through milestone or its location will be recorded by trusted "witnesses". This information will then be written permanently in the Omnitude blockchain. This whole process will rely on smart contracts that will run on each Omnitude node. These smart contracts are responsible for tracking the progress of the object and releasing payments to shippers or suppliers when certain milestones are reached. This whole process will be automatic regardless of the number of parties involved in the supply chain.

The Solution for Identity Confirmation: Omnitude's solution is based on three products: Single Identity, Proof of Interaction and Single Reputation.

Single identity aims to reduce the effort of merchants to establish the identity of a customer and allow the customer a simplified and faster registration. A customer with an OID (Omnitude unique identity) will only enter their personal data and preferences once. This data will be verified by the merchant and encrypted and stored on the Omnitude Blockchain. Whenever it makes a purchase from a merchant, the customer may, from the application Omnitude, transmit his personal information already verified by the first merchant. This will greatly simplify and speed up the buying process for everyone: the merchant will not have to verify the customer's personal data and the customer will not have to enter them with each purchase.
Proof of Interaction (POI) is used to establish that a customer has a real history with the merchant on which he is issuing a review. Whenever a customer with an OID makes a purchase from a merchant, a registration will be made in the Omnitude Blockchain. When a customer wishes to review a merchant, a check will be conducted in the Blockchain Omnitude to verify that there has been a transaction between the customer and the merchant. If this is the case, the customer may submit his review. This system makes it possible to combat fraudulent reviews and may improve the notification mechanisms by allowing a client to submit a review aout a merchant only when he has made "n" purchase from the merchant.
Single Reputation builds trust between merchants, customers, and suppliers. Thanks to the OID system, the reputation of each player in a transaction is known to all. The reputation system also makes it possible to follow the speed and accuracy of the various actions of the chain (fast or not, timely payment, partial or full payment, ....).

Solutions to high transaction fees: Omnitude offers an alternative payment system based on cryptocurrency. This eliminates payment gateway fees and replaces them with lower Blockchain transaction fees.

4. An experienced team

The Omnitude team consists of 15 members including three co-founders:

Chris Painter, CEO of Omnitude, was for 9 years managing director of Pixel by Pixel, a web design and development agency focuses primarily on providing solutions to eCommerce platforms.
Vladimir Kalynyak, co-founder, is also the co-founder of Simbirsk Technologies, the publisher of the CS-Cart eCommerce platform, which is currently sold in more than 160 countries (making it one of the world's leading eCommerce platforms). Recently, his attention has focused on the Blockchain. Thus, his research and his experience about Blockchain constitute a major asset for the team.
Robert Belgrave, co-founder and Advisor of Omnitude, is best known as the founder and CEO of the cloud computing services company Wirehive. In the past, he was also Advisor for Dadi and held the position of Lead Solution Architect in many companies.

In addition to the three co-founders, two profiles are also very interesting:

Ben Bennet, the director of operations, is also the Founder and Director of two companies in addition to Omnitude. He has been sales director of six different companies in the space of 13 years. His extensive sales experience will be crucial in presenting the Omnitude project to potential customers.
James Worthington, CTO, is one of four co-chairs of the Hyperledger Healthcare Working Group and a member of the Hyperledger Performance and Scaling Working Group. He has also been involved in the Hyperledger Foundation since the beginning of their project by being a key evangelist for Blockchain technology.

The rest of the team consists of experienced profiles in finance, communication and marketing as well as blockchain. 8 Advisors from diverse and varied sources complete the team.

5. A working Proof of Concept

At the end of March 2018, Omnitude launched a first fully operational Proof Of Concept (POC) that permits to present in a more concrete way the Omnitude vision; a kind of foretaste.

In the POC it's possible to create an account on one of three mock eCommerce sites available which corresponds to the creation of an OID for the user. A dashboard with some future features of the product is also available. The POC is available on two urls: https://portal.omnitude.store and https://demo1.omnitude.store/.