New Open Digital Marketplaces: Giving Buy, Sell and Trust Control Back to Users

Abstract

Companies such as Amazon, Flipkart, Zomato, Oyo and Uber which we refer to as Digital Marketplaces are globally emerging across different business sectors. These marketplaces connect buyers and sellers and the marketplace owners act as central trustworthy authority to provide trade assurances. However, such a trust model could be problematic. Without any alternatives, rapidly growing users of the marketplace, both buyers and sellers are forced to trust the marketplace owner to satisfy their needs. Regulating users, control over digital transactions, exercising autonomy are other issues to name (but) a few indicating that marketplace owners are transparently replacing governments. In our view, Digital Marketplaces should be democratic as the markets in the real-world and control must be given back to the users since they are the contributors in the growth of these marketplaces. This paper presents a new way of Open Digital Marketplaces that model real-world buyer and seller interactions. Proposed solution involves users of marketplace as partakers in a digital transaction for connecting buyers and seller with trade assurances by leveraging their personal connections. Trust is made localized and the supply chain becomes subjective to the user as in the real-world. Switching the role of marketplace owner with the users, eliminates the need for trusting the marketplace owner as a central authority as well as diminishes autonomy and authority of the marketplace owner over the digital transactions. Users, with whose efforts trade is made digitally successful, are rewarded with an incentive, a type of shareholding in the digital transaction, as per the electronic contracts digitally signed by participants before executing the transaction. Disputes or violations of contract are resolved by an automated system, can also be escalated to an independent body or to a local court for a decision. Feedback received from the experiment based on the implementation of the proposed solution suggested ease of doing business by small businesses as well as increase in revenue. It also creates new opportunities for users to earn revenue share in digital transactions, instead of only the marketplace owners, in the emerging gig economy.