| Abstract |
Nowadays, e-commerce has made its official way into the clicks-and-mortar era. The advantage of the clicks-and-mortar strategy is that it enjoys logistics support from the "mortar" counterpart, which complements any operational inadequacy on the side of the virtual website - the "clicks" counterpart. In the future, the clicks-and-mortar model can facilitate the merging of different businesses and strategic partnerships that will diversify sales channels as well as client sources. When an Internet brand attempts to establish a physical distribution channel, it must take into consideration three aspects in which physical channels are inferior to the virtual marketplace: (1) issues of lease costs, (2) issues of merchandise inventory, and (3) issues of product profit. Among all, the most concerning issue is the inability to keep realtime tabs of sales conditions, which can lead to slow-moving inventory sitting on shelves of physical stores, accumulating dead stocks. The price of a merchandise may differ at a physical store and at the virtual marketplace; moreover, the two channels have different schedules and paces in updating products and hosting sales events, creating an information discrepancy between the physical store and the virtual store, which leads to price competition and client source competition between the physical store and the virtual store. This study utilizes blockchain technology to establish a clicks-and-mortar information exchange mechanism. The blockchain technology can be used to authenticate information accuracy and security, which can facilitate information integration between different information platforms of vendors. Meanwhile, in order to enhance the blockchain's security, dark web technology must be employed to elevate the security of the blockchains. Clicks-and-mortar requires not only market integration but also the formation of alliance or merging between different vendors. This study applied the concept of "group" to our blockchain mechanism so that e-commerce vendors of the same alliance can access each other's data, thereby facilitating the strategy of diversifying commerce. The study also conducted performance analysis and security analysis of our proposed mechanism, and the results confirm that our proposed method is indeed feasible. |