How eCommerce engage in Metaverse

The way consumers engage online is changing. The younger generation are born in the environment where shopping and socializing through social media AR filters, video games, and immerse interactive, real-time content  is such a normal thing to do. As time keeps going forwards, consumer behavior will lean more towards the digital renaissance. It is a matter of time until the metaverse blends the virtual with reality.

Metaverse

Quoting Zuckerberg’s words, metaverse is the evolution of the current internet experience. 

It is a digital reality where social media, online gaming, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and cryptocurrencies combine together to realize virtual interaction between users.

The metaverse popularity has accelerated these days, and it is likely the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic as many people have experience working and studying from home. 

But, how does it affect eCommerce?

It is common knowledge that physical barriers are an obstacle to businesses, but the metaverse can solve that problem. 

Imagine that you are a consumer and you need a pair of boots because winter is closing by, but the nearest shop you know that sells boots is far away from your house. You don’t have the time to go there, so you can just buy one through the internet. However, the metaverse is different. It will bring the shop to you virtually, just like you are going to the physical shop in reality.

If people are able to make the most of the metaverse, eCommerce could reach hundreds of millions of dollars within ten years in the metaverse, Facebook said.

Marketing 

In order to profit from it, people need to think that the metaverse is a platform for us to do marketing aggressively.
Of course, traditional advertising will not work well here. Instead, people might be able to use the strategy similar to the virtual reality advertising. For example:

• VR demo for explaining every details about the products
• VR experience that is meant for educational purposes and at the same time build the customer’s interest in your products.

Besides VR experiences, virtual stores and exhibitions will also be one thing people need to know as the most important thing in metaverse marketing is how much they can bring physical shop to the customer virtually.

It is like you build an apparel shop in Animal Crossing or make a 360-degree lookbook so that the customer can take a look at the item just like how they see it in the physical store. For instance, the video game titled Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow by Balenciaga where they release their Fall 2021 Collection.

NFTs

Aside from the change of marketing strategy, more people will value digital assets because they spend more time online. Here is where you need to know about the non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

This token is the most popular virtual ownership that helps transferring virtual assets between users. NFTs can represent digital items, such as art, gifs, music, and videos, and also real items, such as tickets to real world events, deeds to a car, legal documents, etc. One NFTs can only represent one item and only have one owner, but creators can make NFTs for each item they made. 

There are several uses of NFTs, and one of them is to maximize the creators’ earnings. Take the example of digital arts. It is possible that someone can just a screenshot of the original, but if it is represented by NFT, just like physical items, the replica will not be worth more than the real one.

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Yes, we may still can’t access the metaverse for the time being, since it is still kind of like a concept. That is one reason why it is still hard to imagine how metaverse will look like. Moreover, to get immersed in the metaverse, more technical resources is a must.

But it is not a wrong thing to start small and do things with VR and bring your shop into the virtual world. There is nothing to be feared more than to be left behind by trends.