Flipkart, the Walmart-backed Indian e-commerce giant, has launched a pilot to allow its customers to experience making purchases in a metaverse environment. The company announced the launch of its own metaverse, called Flipverse, in which several brands will be able to offer their own shopping experiences.
Flipkart to Launch Flipverse: A Metaverse of Purchases
Flipkart, one of the biggest India-based e-commerce companies, has announced it will pilot its own metaverse purchasing experience. Called Flipverse, this metaverse will allow customers to experience purchasing as if they were physically present in a virtual store through their smartphone.
According to the company, the experience wants to bring gamification and loyalty points to the shopping experience, allowing customers to collect supercoins and digital collectibles from different brands that are already signed on to be part of this pilot program.
To create the new platform, Flipkart established a partnership with eDAO, a Polygon-incubated firm, to prepare the metaverse experience for this month’s launch. The company has already enrolled the participation of several key partners including Puma, Noise, Nivea, Lavie, Tokyo Talkies, Campus, VIP, Ajmal Perfumes, and Himalaya, that will be able to offer their own tailored experiences and stands in Flipkart’s metaverse.
A Flipkart executive stated:
The idea is to have millions of users experience Flipverse and open the doors to the future of shopping. Fifteen years ago, we were the first Indian company to launch Web 2.0-based commerce. And I feel today we are the first company to launch Web 3.0 commerce.
Retail and the Metaverse
While metaverse retail experiences have been pretty limited so far, with the 2017 video that resurfaced this year showing an example of how purchases would be made in a hypothetical Walmart-themed metaverse, Flipkart and Polygon believe there is a big opportunity in the future for this kind of virtual shopping experience.
Sandeep Narwal, the co-founder of Polygon, stated:
While we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible in the metaverse, we see e-commerce as one of the killer use cases. Combining top brands with Flipkart’s e-commerce expertise in a virtual environment stands to revolutionize online retail as we know it.
Walmart, which owns 72% of Flipkart, has already made its first metaverse move, in the Roblox universe in September, launching two experiences named “Walmart Land” and “Walmart’s Universe of Play.”
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