E-commerce is not an interoperable machine. Many of the moving parts are held together by duct tape and elbow grease. In other words, temporary fixes and human effort are used to bridge the gap between the many different systems and frameworks that hold the e-commerce behemoth together.
Of course, large corporations like Amazon don’t suffer as much from these inconveniences. Although we do believe they would benefit from our technology as well, they are in control of their playgrounds. When you do business with them, you play by their rules. And that goes for any market where your product is hosted, which is part of the problem.
But even large businesses that don’t have their marketplaces suffer from a lack of connectivity behind the scenes. Each market has its own rules and regulations. It is difficult to transfer inventory data from one market to another. Typically, inventory needs to be manually input every single time.
Those rules might differ from each other and each brand’s own rules. POS, ERP, CRM, SKUs — each of these various systems behave differently. Data transferred from one is scrap when inserted into another. E-commerce as a whole would see a huge benefit from sharing a cohesive, interoperable platform that works for everyone, no matter what you are using it for.
SHOPX eNFTs — One Size Fits All
SHOPX’s Mintz will be used to mint special NFTs that are optimized for e-commerce. Each real-life product will be identified with these unique digital tokens— eNFTs —and stored on the blockchain for maximum security and transparency. NFTs are identifiable and their sales histories are verifiable. This will provide brands and suppliers with supply chain visibility as well.
Each NFT will be listed in a publicly visible, global inventory, as well as individual inventories of individual markets. The public eNFT inventory replaces GS-1 as a global repository and the standard for all product and unit-level eNFTs on the blockchain and is agnostic to all unique item serializations systems/preferred machine-readable technologies such as QR, RFID, NFC, and BLE.
This means that each brand’s inventory will be completely standardized across all marketplaces that support Web3 technology. And SHOPX is building the plugins required to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3. Meaning SHOPX is building a completely interoperable framework that works for all brands, no matter where they are in the supply chain. That inventory data can be transferred from market to market with almost zero friction.
Improved Unique Item Serialization Empowers Inventory Management
SHOPX uses eNFTs to catalog and monitor its global inventory on the blockchain. Because they are stored on a blockchain, they cannot be duplicated or tampered with. Every single item in a brand’s inventory will be uniquely identifiable and trackable wherever it goes.
To list a product for sale, simply mint an eNFT with Mintz. When a product is purchased from any market that is listing the eNFT, that eNFT becomes unavailable for sale on every other market in real time. This makes it impossible to purchase an item that is out of stock, solving the double-sale problem, or out-of-stock sale problem. If the product comes back in stock, each market that had previously listed the item will become restocked in real time.
A universal inventory also indicates to the buyer that they are always getting the best price regardless of which market they are visiting.
However, there is still room for improvement with this system. There currently is no scalable method to link individual physical products to their digitally equivalent eNFT. SHOPX is currently working with partners that are using micro-particles that can be applied to the product and scanned to verify its unique identity.
Empowering New Marketplaces With SHOPX
The exciting future of a global public inventory is when it is applied to affiliate marketing. Mintz is the affiliate marketing system enabled by eNFTs. Affiliates can browse the public inventory and choose which eNFTs they want to list in their marketplaces.
This means that individuals can run successful marketplaces without needing to own any inventory. It’s dropshipping on steroids. There are no intermediaries, no negotiations, and only one action is required to make a sale and collect the commission. No extra steps, no complications. List the eNFT on your store and that’s it.
What will your store look like? Will you sell the best Super Bowl party supplies in your state? Will you sell just one highly-curated, chic outfit per month? Or maybe you know just what your city needs to battle the cold/heat when it gets really bad. It will be ridiculously customizable because there won’t be any limits to how many different products and brands you can list. Even if you chose one item each from one hundred different brands, your experience will be no more complicated than if it was just one brand.
