DeM-CoD: Novel Access-Control-Based Cash on Delivery Mechanism for Decentralized Marketplace

The cash on delivery (CoD) is currently one of the significant payment mechanism in many developing countries' E-commerce systems. A transaction between a seller and a purchaser is completed when the seller has agreed to exchange packaged goods for a payment from the purchaser. Building highly trustworthy, accountable, credible, and decentralized CoD systems to trace and track physical items is a very challenging task. Several technologies and models for deploying CoD-based applications have been proposed in the literature. In most scenarios, these models have been created with the aim of accommodating collaborative processes involving multiple participants, e.g. seller, purchasers, and shippers, that belong to independent organizations. However, these approaches face several limitations and require appropriate improvement to sustain CoD-based systems' adoption further. First of all, there are no incentives for participants to act honestly. Secondly, the shippers are often kept out of the delivery chain and are affected by or not involved in any incentives or logs. Last but not least, users' privacy can be easily compromised and sensitive data collected and generated during the transactions can be easily accessed and abused. Building upon these critical insights, we propose a novel decentralized marketplace mechanism using the smart contract via blockchain technology. Our approach operates by incentivizing all the participants to act honestly and fulfill their obligations without resorting to a trusted third party. It also integrates adapted access control protocols to protect user privacy. The model's architecture shows that our approach guarantees integrity and robustness. It contributes to effectively addressing the issues listed above. A complete code solution is publicized on the authors' GitHub repository to engage further reproducibility and improvement.