In the talk of modern-day technology, Blockchain has always been a hyped topic amongst tech lovers, in which the NFTs – Non-Fungible Tokens, particularly. But when it comes to online marketplaces, though with a myriad of diversities, the idea of integrating the e-commerce and NFT marketplaces is getting the attention of the technology and retail industry leaders.
Now the question is, “How will e-commerce platforms, utilizing centralized online management systems for each and every retail process, find a balance to run gracefully and achieve revolution by adopting the NFT trends?”
Well, that’s the secret we are going to spill here to amuse you with powerful online retail business management software solutions unlocking mind-blowing business opportunities.
Why is NFT the Best Opportunity for E-commerce Businesses to Look After?
NFTs are unique blockchain-based digital assets with distinguishable signatures, used to represent a range of commodities, including art pieces, real estate, fashion designs, etc.
It enables sellers to trade off their unique, authentic, immutable ownership of products with the use of digital, highly-secured crypto-currencies. Because of its non-fungible capabilities of selling and buying goods, and that too, through a highly secured facility free from rigid regulators, it is creating hype amongst the retail industry.
The popularity of NFT investment for trading, NFT marketplace development, and enhancing the digital representation of mission-critical products has been skyrocketing in the business world since its introduction. As per the Metav.RS survey, NFT’s weekly sales volume has increased from 100 sales in 2017 to 15,000 – 50,000+ in 2022.
On the other hand, e-commerce platforms are also making better business opportunities with trade and goods exchange services.
And this trade and exchange application of both marketplaces is giving the green light to the possibilities of integrating NFT and e-commerce platforms, creating better business scopes.
How to Leverage NFTs for Better E-commerce Business Opportunities
NFT offers e-commerce businesses countless reasons to adopt it, but here are the ways e-commerce platforms can leverage NFTs to transform their online marketplaces.
Boost Integrity
As NFTs are inherited with blockchain capabilities, it majorly helps to confirm product ownership and authenticity. But how?
Due to the blockchain’s shared ledger, buyers can see product ownership and authenticity details, such as the number of times an item has been sold, the previous owners, and other data regarding its sales history. In short, NFTs provide buyers all details about the product supply chain through tamper-proof labelings, like QR codes and NFC smart labels.
Additionally, the integration of NFT in businesses debuting in e-commerce can benefit the most from the fair profit-sharing system.
Unique Proposals
NFTs offer businesses a great hybrid model of shopping, which also enables merchants to scale up their product catalog, resulting in a better profit. As today, the market is filled with tons of competitors offering the same product with nearly similar features, minting the NFTs of products can help e-commerce businesses to set unique proposals and gain market attention.
Not just that, even merchants can offer buyers an opportunity to own the product in the fastest possible way with the digital token, even if they have to wait longer to get the physical product in their hands.
Loyalty Programs
When it comes to loyalty programs to retain regular customers by offering lots of benefits, NFT helps a lot by offering real-world utility. The entities could include event tickets, loyalty cards, discount cards, gift cards, or membership programs, which further be moved to the distributed blockchain record.
The best part of implementing loyalty programs using NFT and blockchain is that it is beneficial for both producers and consumers. Loyalty programs through blockchain can cut costs for merchants, enhance customer experience, and merchants can offer more rewards to customers to retain them.
For example, customers can earn loyalty programs by buying one product and spending those points on other activities, such as membership discounts, dinner check discounts, etc.
Pre-launch Products With NFT to Create Hype In the Market
Pre-launching a product through mining NFT as a limited collection can create hype and excitement amongst customers to own it even before it is launched in the market.
Even popular brands like Adidas, Nike, Prada, Budweiser, Evian, Tiffany’s (CryptoPunks NFT), and many others have launched their premium collection by minting NFTs and launching those collections in the metaverse. With those launches, these brands have converted a lot of business.
Branding
No matter how new or old your brand is, integrating NFTs with your star offerings will always help you get attention and reputation in the market way faster than traditional branding efforts.
NFT helps retailers to add another layer to connect with consumers through the digital revolution and assurance of personal data confidentiality and security.
Community Support
NFT is highly known to the community of artistic work lovers. And if your brand is someone in that field, opting for NFT minting can boost your action to gain popularity amongst the digital audience and their brand or product lover communities.
As there are numerous NFT communities, brands can use any of them to mint their product-based NFT and launch it to start building a stronger community and have customer engagement. Sources could be creative post-building, messaging, or other promotional activities to spread brand awareness.
Metaverse
Consider metaverse a new world to get lost in but more like a computer-generated virtual world for modern tech users to have another life and build social connections effectively. Metaverse is a virtual world programmed by combining mixed reality, NFTs, blockchain, AI, and many other web 3.0 technologies.
In short, just like a real-world, metaverse enables us with another life and NFTs complement it to have realistic-world-like, secure, authentic commodities. Some experts also call the metaverse a future of our existence.
In the metaverse, you can launch your virtual avatars, lands, and many other properties and get them adoptable NFTs of real-life products, which indirectly helps in business profit margins.
Additionally, the adoption of a metaverse in the e-commerce world is expected to reach USD 85,885.22 million at a CAGR of 39.65% during the forecast period 2023-2027.
Moreover, metaverse in e-commerce is the key target market for the countries, including the US, China, Japan, Germany, and the UK. It has the potential to drive better e-commerce market growth with the use of AR technology and offering personalized digital experiences.
How Different Industries With Ecommerce Platform Appearance Can Leverage NFT?
Ecommerce company
As bringing a revolution in the e-commerce app development platform, Shopify has initiated its steps towards NFT and implemented a feature to allow e-commerce merchants to register and sell their NFT content, which we also know as NFT collectibles. Shopify’s NFT marketplace is known as Tokengated Commerce.
Music Marketplace
NFTs offer a way for musicians to monetize their artistic work without losing any cut to publishing media. Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park received a lot of praise by putting his digital artwork called One-Hundredth Stream for sale on the NFT marketplace called Zora.
Fashion Marketplace
To date, fashion-focused e-commerce marketplaces were only providing limited to traditional fashion sale sorts of services. However, one well-known brand from the footwear industry came in front, adopted NFT, and introduced the RTFKT X NIKE CrytoKicks patent facility – an NFT-based system enabling users to create entirely a new pair of shoes by splitting up two pairs of virtual shoes.
America’s top clothing brand – Fred Segal, adopted NFT to create a physical display of their branded products, from which some were even sold at the cost of thousands plus dollars.
Home Decor
NFTs have a lot to offer to home decor lovers. It allows them to purchase their eye-pleasing designs with unique identifiers and total immutable ownership.
Seeing the popularity of NFT in e-commerce, IKEA – the leading Swedish-Dutch multinational furniture company, launched its products in the NFT world with a channel named Space10 with an NFT concept – Carbon Banks, promoting eco-friendly furniture.
Though it is famous for sending out furniture and allowing owners to assemble/build their furniture with their own hands to have a deep relationship with the product. However, this initiation to tree-based NFT will become beneficial to develop a more sustainable relationship with furniture.
IKEA’s Space10 has even collaborated with other groups, such as Zünc Studio, WINT Design Lab, EFFEKT, and many others, to make its project more impactful.
Apart from IKEA, other brands like 4Space Design have debuted in the metaverse with its NFTs of unique 3D-modeled chair design collections in OpenSea with the title MetaChair Society. Other top home decor brands, especially furniture brands like Dims, Nomanzi, etc., are also planning to make their debut in the NFT marketplace with a boom.
Multi-sided Platforms
Businesses associated with multiple vendors can benefit a lot by incorporating NFTs. This can help them provide each and every user a unique ID to protect their sensitive data from fraudulent actions and build trust and integrity.
Speaking of a multi-sided platform/market, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has recently launched an NFT marketplace that allows users to sell intellectual property licenses in the NFT form, which can be accessed via its own auction platform.
In A Nutshell
NFTs are indeed the assets to increase business turnover, especially in the case of the e-commerce industry. It helps massively in the product pre-launch, branding, social collaborations, protecting the product authenticity, traceability, ensuring transparency, and many other ways.
Although the adoption of NFT is still in its starting phase for limited applications, it surely is the future of the e-commerce industry. Hope that you have found this article insightful, but don’t forget to follow e-commerce trends to make your online retail business a heavy profit-making one.
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