Buying.com Is Ready To Usher In The Second-Generation E-Commerce Revolution

The following post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga.

Amazon.com, Inc. AZMN came online during 1995 as yet another online bookstore. One that didn't even have the support of local brick-and-mortar stores, like Barnes and Noble, so the new website passed under most people's radar, even expert observers. Little did we know, back then, that this bookstore would be at the center of the next revolution on the Internet: e-commerce.

Four years later, Amazon made a billion USD. That's quite an achievement if you consider that Macy's M, a household name in department stores, had to wait 134 years to have that accolade.

There's no question that e-commerce has exploded over the last generation. We could even say that we're now at the second human generation with e-commerce because it's been more than 25 years since that ball started to roll.

The industry was already snowballing when the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world to put the whole process on steroids. As people across the globe found they couldn't go out to buy groceries and other goods without risking contagion, many discovered the convenience of online shopping.

Suddenly Amazon had to hire new employees by the hundreds of thousands, and the industry grew at a rate beyond Jeff Bezos’ Wildest dreams.
Amazon is not alone at the top. Alibaba is a big player because it links the Chinese manufacturing powerhouse with the rest of the world. Both platforms look untouchable as things stand today, and some other, smaller, e-commerce websites are going strong too. But are these e-commerce giants really too big to fail? Have they become a fact of nature?

Let's remember Internet history a little. Over the last three decades, we've seen many giants seem invulnerable to competition, new ideas, or changes in the environment. IBM IBM, Microsoft MSFT, and Yahoo are names that come to mind. Businesses that were at the top of the world and then lost their dominance over the market or even became irrelevant. Things change, and the inertia inherent in the size of those giants precluded the swift adaptation they needed to keep up with the flow.

It's all about second-generation technology, how it arrives and establishes itself by pushing aside the first-generation. The search engine wars are, perhaps, the best example we have of this phenomenon. In the beginning, there were Yahoo, Excite, AskJeeves, AltaVista, and a handful of others nobody remembers.

Excite was the coolest, AskJeeves seemed the most useful one, AltaVista had the best hardware and database technology, but Yahoo became the leader because, while its search engine wasn't the best, it provided its users with many other valuable services such as email, web hosting, etc. So Yahoo looked invincible, its stock was sky high, it had lots of users, and things looked great.

Those were all first-generation search engines. First-generation digital or internet technology has the problem that it's never that digital. We mean that first-generation solutions are essentially the exact old analog solutions implemented with the help of computing power.

Thus they look more powerful, but they're hardly any different than the old options, except that some of the friction in the analog process is lessened by computers. So yes, AltaVista's database was huge, but it was no different from a traditional index book, except it wasn't printed on paper. That's why none of the first-generation remained relevant when the dust settled in.

Google won the search-engine wars, in case you had not noticed. Why? Because its founders understood the problem of Internet searches as a digital problem on the Internet that required a digital solution built from the Internet itself. Thus its search engine method didn't just collect the information available on web pages. It also used the links available on those pages to decide what is the most relevant content in the network.

Google GOOGL searches became better than the rest because they enabled users to find the answers they needed more quickly. And there was something else. Google knew from the beginning how it would monetize its product, which for most of the other search engines in the market was still something of a mystery.

So Google, the last man to arrive at the scene, also turned out to be the last man standing because it was the first second-generation product in the market. Because it had a novel solution to an old problem that was inherently digital and not an analog solution on digital steroids. And that's why the pioneers that open the doors of most digital industries often do not stay around to tell the tale as the better solutions come along.

It could happen in e-commerce as well. How? A new e-commerce firm that creates a more efficient and digital-oriented way to solve the same problem is a second-generation e-commerce platform. Something like Buying.com.

One of the new ideas we've seen appear on the Internet during the last generation is the blockchain. Blockchains can render a database secure through decentralization, and they are the idea behind Bitcoin and every cryptocurrency.

Many blockchain-based projects have come online since 2008 after Bitcoin appeared that try to harness the power of decentralization to tackle other problems than ledger keeping. But, unfortunately, most of those projects are almost academic, and they remain too theoretical or too high-brow to function in the real world. That's not the case with Buying.com. This project aims, among other things, to apply blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies to e-commerce to create the industry's second generation of platforms.

So What Is Wrong With Alibaba Or Amazon, Anyway?

There's nothing wrong with the e-commerce giants or even with other smaller industry players. But they are first-generation. As such, they are still using solutions that are too analog for the new digital reality.

For instance, they rely on the traditional postal system or delivery services such as FedEx or UPS to fulfill their orders. This isn't wrong, but those are centralized organizations that are too big and too clumsy. You can improve on them by adopting a different delivery system based on local and decentralized systems. This is just one of many examples of how Buying.com intends to make e-commerce more efficient for the second generation.

How Is The Second Generation Going To Be?

If the second generation of e-commerce platforms will revolutionize the industry again, it will have to be innovative, more efficient, greener, faster, and cheaper. It will also need to take advantage of the newest technologies available.

Buying.com has an excellent idea of how that will come about. It all starts with blockchain adoption. The project will keep a database in a decentralized network that will guarantee its security, integrity, and transparency. And where there's a blockchain, there's a cryptocurrency—the $BUY token, in this case, which will incentivize both stores and users. The token offering will be launched on July 14th, 2021 at 9:00 AM PST and more details can be found in TrustSwap’s medium post.

Other improvements over the current e-commerce systems include a micro-distribution network powered by decentralized delivery networks, based locally; direct contact with wholesalers and distributors so that the buyers can have access to the lowest possible prices; real-time logistics and tracking; vertical process integration; integrated back-office e-commerce processing technology; peer to peer dropping and picking networks.

The project already includes an app called Direct Protect App, which has been in development for several years and whose goal is to guarantee every buyer to find the lowest possible price in the market.

Buying.com expects that all those new features will remove some of the friction involved for many relatively small sellers to come online and join the e-commerce industry having a real opportunity to compete with the giants successfully.

The Outlook

Can Buying.com's innovations become as influential in e-commerce as to level the playing field with the world's giants? That would be great news for the world's smaller businesses who would find an outlet for their products with a global reach without selling their soul to the dominant market forces.

Only time will tell.

Amazon, Alibaba BABA, and their peers (if they have any) remain the rulers in global e-commerce, and they will remain so until a new, better platform comes along to challenge their position. This should surprise nobody because it's happened before in every novel digital industry, as we explained regarding the search engines. It will happen again in the e-commerce field for sure. And it could be because of Buying.com.

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The preceding post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.