Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify is often lauded for lowering the barrier to entry for small businesses looking to succeed in the challenging world of online sales. With more than 2 million individual merchants in 175 countries, and an estimated $650 billion in total sales, it would be hard to overstate Shopify’s relevance in today’s retail landscape.
Shopify’s thousands of available applications allow merchants to customize shops, implement chatbots, and manage their Instagram feeds. But they also help retailers explore blockchain-enabled commerce, including minting and selling their own NFTs.
In January, Shopify announced an integration with New York-based Ava Labs, maker of the Avalanche blockchain, and Shopify app Venly, which expanded the platform's NFT offerings.
The new partnership means merchants can design, mint, and sell Avalanche NFTs through the Shopify platform, easily uploading images to create digital tokens which can then be displayed and sold in their Shopify stores, just like physical products. Purchases are processed automatically, and buyers then get an email to access their new NFT (no existing crypto wallet necessary!)
- Avalanche is one of the largest blockchains out there, according to Ava Labs CEO John Wu, and is growing quickly, reporting 1,500% transaction growth in 2022.
- In early 2023, Avalanche also teamed up with Amazon Web Services, the first blockchain to do so, offering blockchain as a service to AWS users.
- The speed, low cost, and small environmental footprint of Avalanche made it an obvious pick, Tim Dierckxsens, CEO and co-founder of Venly, said in a statement.
Meeting demand
The integration with Venly demonstrates a focus on usability and easy access to Web3 technology for retail, Wu told Retail Brew.
“We always talk about, ‘How do we bring the next billion users onto Web3? How do we bring the next trillion dollars of assets into Web3?’” he said. “This is why creating partnerships through Venly with Shopify…creates that ease of use—not just for the retail person, but also behind the scenes underneath the hood."
The new partnership with Shopify is significant because it targets smaller businesses that may want to experiment with NFTs but don’t have the resources to do it on their own, Wu said.
- The top reason most merchants are interested in offering NFTs is the loyalty opportunities, but they can also offer an additional revenue stream, he added.
Simplifying the process can help ease Web3 skepticism, Wu said.
“Merchants right now, just like individual consumers, [have] some doubt,” he explained. “Some people religiously think about it, others [think] it’s a scam and don’t get it.”
The demand for plug-and-play NFT sales is coming from the merchants themselves, he added. “Merchants from Shopify are asking for something like this and to experiment, to learn,” Wu said, and they’re paying attention to the interests of their younger consumers.
“For the brands…they should realize that their competitors are actually starting to go into the sandbox themselves, to learn, to play, to use, to understand the benefits viscerally, as opposed to just hearing about it.”—MA