As a new brand or market, it can be difficult to cobble together the right tools for your business. We all make sacrifices and choose what tools we need at the moment to move forward based on cost and ease of use. Many of the tools we need to facilitate or complete our vision are often expensive or complicated to use. Further reading: The Retail Apocalypse and Blockchain.
Large brands don’t have this problem. They can afford any new systems or services available without worrying about how difficult they are to use because they can afford to pay the right people to make it happen.
But accessibility and scalability shouldn’t only be available to those who can afford it. Everyone deserves a fair chance to present their product to the market and let the people decide which product is the best, not the investors. Accessibility is what helps create a truly free market. The only hurdle a new entrepreneur should have to face is public opinion.
SHOPX provides the types of tools that large brands use at a low cost and is open for everyone to use. No middlemen, and no costly marketplace fees.
Customer Engagement And Brand Loyalty
Reserves are a SHOPX product that allows brands to mint brand-specific NFTs to give or sell to their customers. These special NFTs can be sold or rewarded to customers in any way the brand sees fit. Holding it will give the customers rewards or perks, which are also decided by the brand. While the NFT is sitting in the customer’s wallet, those perks will be applied at checkout.
One of the more notable perks of this ReserveX NFT is to allow the owner to “hold their place in line” when new, highly-anticipated products are released. In typical Web2 e-commerce, Automated Checkout Bots are often used to buy exclusive merchandise the moment it is made available, and then they resell that merch at a high cost. Loyal customers aren’t given a chance to buy their favorite products at a reasonable price.
The reserve NFT will only allow loyal customers to participate in product drops. Each customer will be able to buy as many items as the brand decides is fair. If the customer is not holding a ReserveX NFT, the checkout button will not be clickable. Customers will also be able to see how many ReserveX NFTs have been distributed, how much product is allocated to each NFT, and how much product is left on the shelves.
This gives store owners an easy, convenient way to reward loyal customers with guaranteed access to product drops, discounts, and other perks. All of this utility at a low cost and through the use of a single NFT.
Affiliate Marketing
Mintz, as you may know, tokenizes your real-life inventory. ConnectX uses this eNFT inventory to enable affiliate marketing. Consider it a B2B SaaS program that connects brands and their products to affiliates.
Each product represented as an MFT will be placed into a global inventory that everyone can access. Affiliates can visit this inventory and select which product they want to sell.
eNFTs are built to automate the affiliate marketing process and give affiliates complete autonomy. When an affiliate sells an eNFT, their commission is sent to them directly. The brand then ships the product to the customer. The brand and affiliate do not need to interact during this process and this process also cuts out the need for expensive third-party intermediaries.
For a new brand, it can be incredibly difficult to access affiliate marketing options. Affiliate networks come with high fees, and dealing with the various types of influencers is a full-time job. Contracts need to be negotiated and accounts need to be paid.
But with SHOPX, brands don’t need to do… anything. When you use Mintz to create your tokenized inventory, you automatically connect yourself to ConnectX. The affiliates do the rest.
Customer Acquisition
When an affiliate sells an NFL, they get a commission based on what the brand is offering. If you want to offer 5%, then that’s your choice. Your product may warrant that low of a commission. You may find that increasing it to 6% or 7% results in a sudden increase in affiliate activity. Or if the holidays come around, you could increase it to 10% to see a surge in sales.
You might even find that a whopping 20% is justified based on your margins and volume. Or you could use a large number like that for a limited time to acquire new customers.
That’s how easy it will be to fine-tune customer acquisition costs based on your budget and margins. The best part is, those costs are only applied at the moment of a successful sale. No more paying and praying. Every dime you “spend” goes directly towards acquiring that new customer. Nothing is wasted on a lackluster sales campaign.
SHOPX’s Inventory Management System
Mintz’s eNFTs tokenize real-world products to standardize inventory management data. This will create a global database for all branded consumer products. Whether you are a consumer or a large brand, this data will be completely protected with blockchain technology.
New brands won’t have to worry about SKUs and other proprietary inventory management systems. Only one system will be needed, and it will stay neat and organized forever. No need to worry that the “website” will go down or that you will lose your data. It will all be safely stored on the blockchain, and the blockchain won’t fail nearly as easily as a centralized server might. Finally, your inventory will update in real time across all marketplaces.
For example, if you have ten t-shirts listed in five blockchain-enabled markets and one sells, the other four markets will reflect nine in their inventory instantly. If all ten sell at one market and another market tries to make a sale, the sale will fail and the customer will not need to be refunded their money after being disappointed that the product was in fact out of stock when they bought it.