Commerce is increasingly becoming global and digital. Global e-commerce market share is estimated to be worth 3.5 trillion dollars. Large corporations have disproportionate control of e-commerce marketplaces and payment networks. In this age, is it possible to have control of your online shop and be truly independent? We examine this in the post below.
What is wrong with Amazon?
Amazon is a great place to sell. 145.2 million mobile users accessed the Amazon app in March 2019 (Statista, 2019). On average, SMBs located in the US sell more than 4000 items per minute (Amazon, 2019). It is not difficult to see merchants with good ratings generate million dollar revenue figures just from Amazon. However, you can go from million to zero in no time too. Check out the below true story (Source: Woocommerce):
You’re a model seller on Amazon, with 98% positive feedback, 99% on-time delivery for all orders, and a 0.11% defective product rate. Amazon now generates 80% of your revenue.
However, since you sell laptop stands, your customers are a bit more tech-savvy than most. They know that if they want to try out a different stand, there are two ways to get free return shipping on Amazon: say the product was defective or “not as advertised”, and the seller pays for return shipping. Despite your wonderful track record, it only takes a small amount of negative feedback like this (5-10 instances) to be completely removed from Amazon.
That means that, overnight, your business of nine people must lay off four employees or more, and you have over $350,000 in inventory you can’t sell and are paying to store. Your effective business has been effectively squashed.
Building Your Own Shop
With the help of WordPress, it is now possible to host your own shop without being at the mercy of large corporations and ratings. BuiltWith reports that in January 2019, a total of 2,906,789 websites use WooCommerce to sell online, or 53,045 of the world’s top million websites.
There are several benefits of building your own shop:
- Data Ownership: Using a proprietary system makes you dependent on that system for customer/product data, and you may not be able to extract it from the system to move elsewhere or to save your business if, for some reason, you can no longer use the platform. That’s why “Freedom from vendor lock-in” was the #1 reason companies chose OSS in 2016.
- Flexibility & Freedom: Usage freedom means you won’t have restrictions on the number of products, variations, images, orders, or other parts of your store. You also can’t be told what you can or can’t sell. Not only do you have freedom in terms of usage, but you also have flexibility in terms of the codebase and customizing your store with various themes/plugins.
The Payment Mafia
Building your own shop though doesn’t give you complete control over the monetary part of the business. Most people won’t hesitate in using PayPal / credit cards to accept payments. However, the money received through PayPal isn’t technically yours.
Gab – A far-right social network with around 800,000 users was banned by both Stripe and PayPal last year.
It’s common to see stories of people getting banned from PayPal without reasons and funds currently in the account also getting frozen.
Decentralized Payments Weds Open Commerce
Bitcoin is a decentralized payment network that lets users have actual control of their own money. The entity having bitcoin private keys is the real owner of bitcoins and these funds cannot be frozen/controlled by other parties. It is now possible to be a truly independent e-commerce seller:
- Host your own server on open-source operating system like Linux/Ubuntu
- Build your own shop using WordPress/Woocommerce
- Take control of your own payments using Bitcoin
Blockonomics at WordCamp Prague 2020
Blockonomics supports the freedom to sell and the right to be independent. WordCamp Prague is a great place for participants in the WordPress ecosystem to converge and empower businesses to do e-commerce. Our WordPress plugin is currently helping more than 2000 merchants worldwide to accept bitcoin payments. We are happy to be a sponsor of WordCamp Prague 2020 and look forward to a continued relationship with the WordPress community.
We are giving away 3 tickets to WordCamp Prague 2020.
