Web3 To Reclaim Commerce Leadership; Metaverse To Be Enabler Metaverse has already seen brands like Nike, Adidas, Gucci and Zara leveraging it. Back home in India, we saw participation from more than 15 brands including Puma, Noise, Nivea, Lavie of e-commece major Flipkart's metaverse shopping experience-Flipverse.

First coined in 1992 by science fiction author Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash, the metaverse has made inroads into businesses and is set to revolutionize commerce. The growing marketplace of the future is already seeing brands like Nike, Adidas, Gucci and Zara leveraging it. Back home in India, we saw participation from more than 15 brands including Puma, Noise, Nivea, Lavie of e-commece major Flipkart's metaverse shopping experience-Flipverse.

At a Web3 and Tech and Innovation Summit 2023 held by Entrepreneur India, Naren Ravula, Vice President, Head of Product Strategy, Deployment & Flipkart Labs, said, "While the technology is very nascent, there is a lot of interest from customers. Our metaverse experience-Flipverse coincided with a big billion days. A lot of brands participated in it. It was a good start. It was our first attempt and we are looking forward to it.

Natural evolution for businesses

Discussing the role of metaverse for commerce, other experts in the panel termed it as a natural evolution for businesses. Says Rajesh Dhuddu, Global Head, Emerging Technologies, Tech Mahindra, "If you look at the businesses, first they started the phone as a medium of interaction with their end customers. And if it was optimal enough, we wouldn't have gotten onto a web interface. The businesses moved from a phone based support to a web-based kind of a presence. If it was optimal enough, we wouldn't have gone into app- based commerce."

Dhuddu feels that there are a lot of unaddressed needs from a customer perspective. "Especially today with the explosion of information and most of our decisions are based on what others are saying and you want to experience everything before the final decision on purchase is based for that phone, mobile, app is suboptimal and for that there is need for more immersive and that's where metaverse steps in."

Deep Ganatra, Group CTO, Good Glamm Group, said the way to make e-commerce successful via the metaverse is through community. "In web2, we tried to bring the retail experience online but in certain or most cases, we never succeeded. The main part of the way offline succeeds is because there is a lot of interaction and you talk to them. Now web3, especially metaverse will enable things in such a way that you're sitting at home and you are actually going to a mall, you are going to a shop, talking to someone and trying out things. That's where it will make a lot of difference, you talk to people as if you are in an offline store and then the conversion will be very high. That's what we all should aim for. And now 5G has rolled out very rapidly, internet speeds are amazing and this is the right time for it."

Innovations to come together

Experts say we need to be careful with what we are promising with the technology, and promises are probably much further ahead than what we are able to deliver. "We've learnt a lot and I think the reality is that it is very expensive to deliver a fully immersive Internet today. Particularly for a mega scale horizontal platform like Flipkart. And so, if you want to build it at scale, there are a lot of innovations that need to come together for that to happen. But the beauty is, web3 is not starting from zero. There have been other technologies on which we are building it, most notably 3D and AR. And today if you look at flipkart App, 3D and AR are first party citizens, it actually adds to the overall experience of customers and improves the conversion rates on the platform."

Lesser hype than before

Some experts also felt that the hype around the metaverse has settled in a bit. The brands and partners who are still interested in building are doing it much more strategically. Samuel Huber, Founder and CEO, LandVault, says, "Last year it was about being first. And now with the current market, there is generally less hype. The projects are bigger, they take longer but are a lot more thought through. And a lot of them also have actual KPIs that are attached to them. Before that it was about let's do something, let's put it out, let's talk about it. Now, a lot of it is about what are the metrics, what are the KPIs, and what are the actual business problems that I'm trying to solve through the metaverse. So the metaverse went from a playground to more of a channel that businesses can leverage to solve their problems. Metaverse is another tool to increase sales, awareness, to build community to solve real business problems. So it's exciting to see metaverse as a true channel beyond the hype which actually generates tangible results.

Beyond retail stores

The session also saw discussion moving towards the use cases of metaverses beyond retail and fashion.

Health

An interesting use case of metaverse has emerged in the area of health. Says Vishal Gondal, Founder & CEO, GoQii: "Metaverse environment cannot be a retail store or just land. There are use cases of metaverse beyond fashion and e-commerce. What we are doing is just the way NFTs became phygital, we are saying the same thing, how can you connect your health data to your digital avatar. And the gamification we are working on is that your avatar becomes younger as you become healthier in the real world. So your avatar and your physical abilities are co-connected. While this co-connection is happening, we are working on virtual health tokens to be accepted by gyms, hospitals in the real world. And its first trial would happen in the UAE because the government wants to look at use cases of metaverse beyond fashion.

Real estate

According to another panelist, Daniel Saliba, CEO, Arra, the single largest asset class in the world is real estate, and by bringing real estate to Web3, we are enabling a huge transformation. "Everyone likes to invest in real estate. We are creating a decentralised ID for real estate just like you may have an ID. By doing that we are giving every property a virtual wallet to enable them to interact in Web 3," he says.

Airport terminal

What does an airport do in a virtual world? It was a question put to Arun Sheshananrayana, General Manager, Innovation Lab, Bangalore International Airport. The Terminal 2 airport of Bengaluru has also been created in the metaverse.

Commenting on the same, Sheshananrayana said, "Right now it's just an experiential platform. You can log in as an avatar. You can walk through the terminal. You can see the T2 but it stops there. But there are a lot of interesting use cases that we foresee, like we can bring commerce into that, we can bring fun into this. Opportunities are endless. We want to focus on those use cases which help our passengers. It's a perfect opportunity to go beyond the physical boundary and the regulations we have. And also a good opportunity for non-passengers who are not flying through Bangalore airport, but can still be connected."