Thanks for the writeup, it was an easy-to-understand read! I just want to add in a few additional points about why blockchain hasn’t really saturated the E-commerce space.
To be fair, blockchain hasn’t “taken over” any space yet. There are scalability issues that exist today — that, combined with a high barrier to entry, results in a user experience that is too complex and slow for the average consumer, who wants immediacy, as suggested by the sub-3-second load time benchmark and even Amazon’s one-day shipping.
A pure blockchain-based system today would not be able to support the transaction speed necessary in order to fulfill a scalable amount of users, and without scale, an E-commerce platform doesn’t make money.
There is also a problem of user habits that hinder development in the E-commerce space. No one spends cryptocurrency due to its volatility, and its consideration as an investment, rather than a transaction-type money. Just look at the notorious Bitcoin Pizza incident — someone used Bitcoin to buy pizza, and now the whole world laughs about it because of how expensive the pizza has become.
E-commerce is heavily dependent on scale, but the TAM for users that are willing to spend cryptocurrency is too small, let alone the percentage of that market that might potentially spend on a particular brand or shop. In other words, user’s habits currently result in a economics model that doesn’t work out well for the E-commerce platform.
Talking about an economics model, you also have to zoom out a bit to examine the other half of the E-commerce model — the supplier side. How many of them are going to take crpytocurrency as payment? If not many (or any), then you have the added stress of volatility. One day, you might have enough to pay your suppliers, while the next day you might be taking out a bank loan.
That all being said, there are E-commerce solutions that superimpose cryptocurrency on existing E-commerce giants. For example, Purse lets people spend Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash on Amazon, and by spending crypto, buyers actually get a discount vs. spending cash.
