E-commerce in the Year 2025: Drones, Oracles and Block-chains
E-commerce has come a long way in the last 10 years. Same day grocery delivery, catalogues spanning hundreds of millions of products, seamless payment gateways, ad retargeting, dynamic repricing and predictive analytics have changed the landscape considerably for both consumers and businesses. As average consumer spend increases and as businesses strive to keep pace with the innovations of the last decade, it helps to ask — how is e-commerce likely to change in the next 10 years?
In this two-part article series, I would like to give my take on how a few select components of e-commerce are likely to shape-up in the year 2025. In part 1, I will tackle this question from the consumer standpoint, focusing on evolution in delivery time and prices. In each case, I would like to consider two scenarios — expected, i.e., the minimum outcome that we should expect, and ambitious, i.e., the outcome were more ambitious possibilities to materialize.