Published Paper Details:

Contemporary e-commerce systems still have to struggle with issues of fake products, insufficient transparency of logistics and the inability to provide verifications of the authenticity of products on the level of consumers. The traditional supply chain systems are based on centralized databases, which can be manipulated, limited in the process of auditability, and cannot reliably provide end users with provenance information. The SmartTrace framework proposed presents a customer-centric and decentralized approach to solving the problem by incorporating the lifecycle tracking of products into the blockchain, the QR-enabled verification, and the AI-based narrative generation. Product events are safely stored in Ethereum-compatible smart contracts, which enable state transitions that are impossible to alter and are controlled by roles by different manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and consumers. IPFS is also used to store sensitive metadata of products, images and tracking summaries to ensure scalability and data integrity. On-chain events in the form of structured event streams are also converted into product journey narratives that can be read by humans by a generative AI component to make usable and transparent to non-technical users. QR scanning allows consumers to verify products by accessing blockchain-based provenance and AI-generated provenance to obtain timelines via a Web3 interface. The introduced prototype proves to be reliable in traceability, tamper-resistant history information and better supply chain visibility, defining an effective way in advancing trust, transparency, and anti-counterfeiting aspects in the contemporary e-commerce settings.