A Blockchain-Driven Compliance Model for Trustworthy E-Commerce Transactions under India's Digital Consumer Protection Laws

Abstract

The rapid expansion of India's e-commerce ecosystem has led to a corresponding rise in consumer grievances, data privacy violations, and non-compliance with statutory norms. Although the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 and the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 mandate transparent disclosures, grievance redressal mechanisms, and seller accountability, enforcement remains inconsistent due to the centralized nature of compliance systems. This paper outlines a proposal of a Blockchain-Driven Compliance Model (BDCM) based on permissioned blockchain infrastructure, smart contracts, and zero-knowledge proofs to guarantee automated, auditable, and enforceable legal compliance. The architecture has the main legal points in smart contracts, including Rule$4(4)$on product disclosure, Rule 5(3) on record retention, and Rule 6(3) on seller liability, and a compliance scoring/alerts system to dynamically monitor the trust is provided. The outputs of simulations on Hyperledger Fabric show that the compliance will be substantially enforced. Most legal clauses had a success rate of$\geqslant 97.5$and grievance redressal time was also lowered by 75 and consumer satisfaction increased to 94.7. The over-95% privacy index trust index guaranteed privacy of the model through the use of the zero-knowledge consent verification algorithm to guarantee privacy of the model among the users who had tested the model. Moreover, the compliance scores successfully ranked sellers according to their legal conduct allowing a proactive suspension and warning of the potential high risk entities. To sum up, the BDCM framework provides a legal-tech interface between legal requirements and technical implementation, which can be transparent, auditable, and trusted.