Blockchain technology in supply chain management and loyalty programs: toward blockchain implementation in retail market

Abstract

Blockchain was first used in finance, but nowadays this technology is expanding its roots in several areas including retail industry, which is always changing and transforming the way retailers proceed in order to earn customer confidence and build consumer loyalty at a time when it has become easily broken. Nowadays more enterprises are trying to integrate blockchain technology in their systems to improve the performance of their supply chain, although the retail sector has modernized enormously in recent years, despite those progresses blockchain still needs to be developed from retail market perspective. This paper presents an introduction to blockchain technology in a simple way, it also analyses the impact of blockchain technology integration of business processes in the retail industry and tries to study how companies can implement blockchain in the retail industry in order to increase customer loyalty and improve the retail supply chain management. This work adds an interesting contribution of blockchain technology to the existing studies with concerns performance in the supply chain within the retail industry.