Hi

I came across your Token very recently and was captivated by the ideas behind your project. I was also very impressed with you and your team and admire the nobility of your vision. As a potential investor, I have some questions regarding your project that I would appreciate if you could find the time to respond them.

From what I gather from your whitepaper and some of your presentations, you propose more of a marketing solution than an e-commerce platform.
Shopin means for adding value is by the creation of a platform for sharing purchase history data among retailers and customer in a decentralized manner, and additionally enhancing the user experience on each of the retailer’s website by leveraging the stored data of said customers.
Looking at some recent trends in the e-commerce market share, one can notice that Amazon and Ebay seem to be increasing their dominance with time, this is especially true for Amazon. The two of them combine for about 50% of the market share for the year 2017.
This trend is likely to continue in my view. Retailers both onsite and online, are at a competitive disadvantage against Amazon in many factors, not just available data.
Amazon adds value to the customer from the bottom of the supply chain all the way to the delivery of the product. While enhancing the retailer’s ability to provide a better user experience would help, is not a silver bullet that would revert this trend.
Amazon has set the standard in many more ways than just the point of sale interaction with the customers. Can you see your project, stop or slowing the amazonization (I just invented that word) trend of e-commerce without affecting all the other functions of the e-commerce business?

From my personal experience and a sample test consisting of my GF, I feel skeptic about the proposition of trading away the benefits of a central marketplace with great diversity of sellers and products with very competitive pricing, excellent peer reviews, excellent customer service, excellent shipping delivery, very generous return policies, high qualities guarantees and the list goes on… for essentially having control of my purchase history and having better user experience on the website of lesser competitors to Amazon with no general standard for the quality of services. At best, the user experience in those websites will be as good as Amazon’s, while lacking the diversity from sellers, products and peer reviews offered by the latter that I would think that greatly enhance the user experience when purchasing products. I can see the use case for some shoppers like my rich and preppy cousin that will only buy stuff directly from the official designer because according to her it guarantees authenticity, but that is more of a niche than anything else.

Please note that I’m not trying to trash your business, as I said earlier I admire you and your team and wish you the best of lucks. My comments are more opinion than research since you are informed on the subject and I’m sure you are aware of what It means trying to disrupt e-commerce, I was hoping you could shed light into the potential that I might be missing out.

Moreover, note that my opinion comes from the perspective of a millennial who has grown to see Amazon as a one-stop shopping solution for 90% of its commercial life. I would be very hard-pressed to consider switching platforms and I don’t see the incentive as to why would I do it for something as what Shopin is suggesting. Also, in the case my beliefs are wrong and Shopin could threaten Amazon, what competitive advantage you have over Amazon that would not allow them to replicate your model if it succeeds. Amazon is known for doing that in the retail space, I cannot see why they would not use their practically infinite capital to build a similar solution that would include the holy grail of datasets, Amazon’s shopping cart history, given that blockchain is open source and I would presume that Amazon already has business relationships with most of the retailers you trying to onboard.

Having said all of the above, I can still see Shopin succeeding in their project by helping to level-out the playing-field in terms of user experience while at the same time the overarching trend in the industry not changing. Meaning that while the e-commerce industry keeps conceding ground to Amazon, Shopin can help ease the pain. That on it is own is probably worth investing, disrupting Amazon would be a very ambitious, perhaps unrealistic, goal and more of a lottery ticket I think.