The 2022 year for NFT and Blockchain on Shopify. 2023 Annual update
Helloš This is Daniil from ECORN Agency. Last year we published a short guide on NFT integration and opportunities on Shopify. Integrating Web3 and blockchain was a completely new concept for us but we learned a lot during this year and prepared our updates in this article.
What happened in 2022?
Over the past year, there have been significant changes in the crypto and blockchain market. First, it was a tough year for crypto, NFT, and even Shopify but every bearish market is a good time to build new projects. For June 2022, sales in the NFT marketplace were less than $1 billion. Sales for June were down 75% compared to the previous monthās figures. It happened for the first time the last year. However, some experts see the benefits and predict an inevitable growth in the NFT market. The drop in sales and the decline in token prices are considered a reason for investment.
NFT clearly become a part of our life and many Web2 companies including Shopify, Meta, Samsung, and Apple recognized it.
When Shopify announced its first comments about NFT integration being available only for Shopify Plus customers last autumn. Then Shopify shared its guidelines and highlighted that NFTs are available only for Shopify Plus customers (less than 1% of the Total number of Shopify stores).
The Shopify team later announced features of Tokengated Commerce and approved dozens of Shopify NFT Apps. Finally, Shopify gave access to all merchants to sell NFTs no matter what is their subscription (That happened recently and doesnāt have official confirmation).
Making its resources available to users to create NFT and blockchain integration, Shopify pushed many merchants and established Web2 brands to join the trend.
Payments
Shopify still doesnāt support connecting a wallet as a payment method and Web3 native payments but merchants can accept crypto payments using Coinbase Commerce or other turnarounds.
Blockchains
At the moment of the last post, we have seen only confirmation of Flow, Ethereum, and Polygon blockchains available for use with Shopify stores. Today there are also available Avalanche, Solana, BSC, MultiversX (Elrond)
Shopify apps for Blockchain integration
Blockchain use cases went beyond simple mint and reselling of NFT on Shopify. In addition to these, emerging app developers offer tokengated commerce, nft, and web3 marketing for Some of the applications in the Shopify App store to work with NFT including:
- Thirdweb
- Venly
- Manifold Merch Bridge
Full list of official Blockchain Partners Apps
Current State of Blockchain integration on Shopify
As of today, Shopify enables a much stronger list of opportunities for blockchain integration. It could be considered both for Web2 and Web3 companies with its availability of blockchains, NFT interaction options, and Web3 integrations.
Although Shopify doesnāt seem a turnkey solution for building Web3-native projects, it looks good as an augmentation to use the benefits of Web2 and still could be considered an excellent platform for startups that are not having strong in-house blockchain expertise. Existing Apps and their features can beat up custom development on Solidity in many cases but not all. Some features that could be highlighted:
- Mint of NFTs
- Primary and Secondary NFT sales
- NFT as a digital twin of the product
- Airdrops
- NFT Collection imports
- Tokengated Sales
- Tokengated Discounts
- Tokengated Content
- Tokengated Subscriptions
- Tokengated Loyalty Programs
- Aggregation of Web2 and Web3 audiences
Notable cases
In 2022 we discovered several notable examples of blockchain & Web3 implementation by established Web2 brands on Shopify:
- Famous NFT collection ā Doodles made a partnership with Shopify and launched a Shopify store together with an offline Pop-up store. Owners of Doodles had the opportunity to purchase exclusive merchandise as part of SXSW 2022.
- The company Liquid Death, which produces drinking water in metal cans, offered its customers a collection of NFTs comprising 6,666 pictures representing heads. Its owners can access a closed community, various virtual events, and other bonuses.
- Beer brand Budweiser has also joined the new marketing trend and released several campaigns with NFT distribution with many utilities like participating in Bud Light NEXT voting and Music royalties. All collections were listed on Shopify and are now available on OpenSea.
- The Ceylon tea brand Richard Royal Tea has introduced its customers to the exclusive NFT Cats & Dogs collection in partnership with Royal NFTea Club. The collection features many utilities both for existing customers and Web3 audiences.
Summary
As you can see, NFT is getting more deeply integrated into the Shopify ecosystem by enabling more features than just Minting. Instead of focusing on the delivery of native Web3 operations, Shopify partners enabled features that can bring additional benefits to Web3 communities with Web2 mechanics. Tokengated Commerce became a trend for progressive projects that want to interact with both IRL and URL audiences.
We are happy to see more and more projects experimenting with Web3 mechanics for marketing, loyalty programs, and commerce. This is just the beginning and Shopify is considering it as a solid opportunity to sustain itself as the market leader in eCommerce.
Thank you for reading, I hope that this article can bring some valuable insights or ideas. Feel free to reach out to the ECORN NFT team or DM me on Twitter. WAGMI
