Considering the circumstances everyone is currently living through, the economy of all countries has been suffering with millions of people out there complaining about this. Even e-commerce platforms are not exempt from criticism and negative reviews. However, with the emergence of peer-to-peer (P2P) innovations, which have many versatile applications to appease both customers and sellers, experts now believe that they are going to shape our near future. While it may be tempting to a lot of people to just ignore all these new applications and stick to their traditional services, the positive prospects that P2P innovations offer may make you change your mind. In this list, we compile a couple of brand-new P2P innovations that may affect our future for the better.
An Intro to P2P
Before getting into the technical details, we should have a general idea of what P2P means. Nowadays, everyone has been working from the comfort of their homes and ordering products online with the press of a button. What a P2P marketplace does, is facilitate this process without any geographical boundaries getting in the way. It works well with most business owners, especially if their business is multinational. P2P networks will help you contact your customer directly, negotiate terms, prices, and deliver shipments to their door in time such as the case with international P2P marketplaces like Amazon.
Reachability Will Reach New Boundaries
There are multiple P2P platforms that work on their reachability to their customers. As we’ve mentioned before, P2P focuses efforts on reaching and contacting customers across the world in a record time and delivers shipments in an even shorter time. The P2P e-commerce gurus from Cahoot state that a proper communication system will detect which warehouse is closer to your location, so it can deliver your package or shipment in a shorter amount of time instead of deploying someone to deliver them from a warehouse that is across the country from you. This will reduce the costs of delivering shipments, will allow you to tap into a wealth of customers from different places, and build trust in your brand’s name, which is something that can help your business grow even more.
P2P Improves Search Engine Results
Contrary to how normal search engines work, a distributed search engine means that there are no central servers. Thus, work processes like mining data, processing queries, handling transactions, and more, will be handled by several peers. This conforms with the idea that the P2P systems are decentralized models and there is no one point of control. P2P search engines are client server-based, which means that your search query will be processed according to the P2P servers you’re connected to. This means that you will have access to different information from all the servers you tap into, but the downside of this process is that not all servers can give you useful information. However, a distributed search engine gives us new ideas on augmenting search engines to get better results.
P2P Lending Services Will Help You Achieve Your Financial Prospects
There are many P2P lending platforms on the internet and using them is fairly easy. As a generation that has suffered from the consequences of multiple financial crises, many young investors would like to transfer their investments to more reliable sources to finance them or protect their interests. While there isn’t a definitive safe platform in which you can invest your money, P2P platforms are proving to be reliable each day. Because millennials are hard-wired to employ technology in all aspects of their lives, it is only natural that they orient their interests toward services that are tech-based like P2P lending. They’re easy to use, especially when it comes to building a diverse portfolio. Diversifying your portfolio is mostly a safe-measure technique, which relies on you investing your money across multiple platforms as a safety measure against losses on a specific platform. This way you won’t have to lose all your money in one go.
P2P Insurance Model Might Win over Traditional Insurance
P2P insurance, or social insurance, works in a shared network where all individuals will combine their premiums, so as to reduce the risk and decrease the conflict that usually occurs between policyholders and an insurer due not paying their premiums. The idea of this insurance is that it includes people that have the same interests (friends or family members) who will have control over their insurance policy, as well as transparency. What is new about this model is that it brings the traditional pooling of premiums and also sharing losses with a group of people using technology (like blockchain technology), which provides a product that more people will be more comfortable using due to the level of trust it has garnered over a short time. While the P2P model is still undergoing changes and not that many people opt for it, it still provides new developments that will impact the insurance sector in the future.
Pawn Shops
P2P innovations all seem to operate on the idea of transparency, trust, and fairness. This also applies to the emerging P2P pawn shops (like Unbolted) that we see on the internet. They are challenging the traditional pawn industry rules and the terms of secured lenders by setting up new ones of their own. They take into consideration that people of this generation appreciate transparency, so they offer it. They also give them better rates and control over their own loans. There are no strict rules over what they’re applying for, as they can choose any item of their preference and upload a picture of it to the platform of the service provider. Once they deliver said item, the money will be on their account in a short time. While the interests are collected day by day, borrowers can still take back their assets anytime they want.
P2P applications and innovations are diverse and almost make their way in many financial and commercial fields. They may not be quite popular among people right now, but they certainly promise a better future for our e-commerce. However, because nothing is inherently risk-free, be sure to do your research and evaluate risk before you choose to invest your money in any of the services mentioned above.