In this article, Justin Floyd, founder and CEO of RedCloud, addresses the barriers to growth that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face in emerging markets and developing economies. Floyd highlights that many SMEs in these regions struggle to trade digitally, with over 500 million lacking an online store. As a result, e-commerce giants like Amazon have monopolized access to technology, digitized systems, and financial support, creating a master-slave relationship that crushes potential competition.
Floyd emphasizes that by 2025, there will be over 5 billion consumers across EMDEs and a tremendous growth opportunity for retailers and small businesses that serve them. Floyd suggests that to maximize these growth opportunities, a new trading system is needed. Traditional e-commerce is largely off-limits to small firms in emerging markets, as it can be prohibitively expensive. Despite the high fees, independent retailers face strict policies that make it almost impossible to access and survive on these platforms.
To address these challenges, Floyd suggests establishing a decentralized marketplace that revolutionizes e-commerce and enables businesses to be more competitive, efficient, and profitable. Decentralized marketplaces allow sellers to reach a wider audience, expand their customer base, and build trust among customers, creating a more positive customer experience.
Floyd also suggests that Web3, which cuts out the intermediary and gives the user back full control, can potentially transform e-commerce for SMEs by powering the new generation of decentralized marketplaces. Additionally, Fintech firms need to step up in emerging markets, offering products, services, and provisions, powering digital payments for B2B merchant transactions, and increasing the GDP of all emerging economies by six percent and unlocking more than $3.7 trillion in growth while creating over 95 million jobs.
In conclusion, Floyd highlights that traditional e-commerce is broken due to limited access to traditional finance and technological solutions available for small businesses in emerging countries. RedCloud’s Open Commerce solution provides access to a decentralized B2B marketplace, where users have full control, offering digitized payments and real-time inventory visibility, insights into the performance of sales promotions, among others, helping over 200,000 retailers buy more than 250,000 products daily worth above $1 billion.
