The growth of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has been one of the most exciting developments in the world of blockchain technology. NFTs have the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with digital content, and many online retailers are already beginning to explore ways to integrate them into their offerings. When it comes to implementing NFTs into an ecommerce business, there are a few different approaches that can be taken. Fortunately, in today’s episode, we have Anthony Lee to talk about the strategies and benefits of integrating and implementing NFTs to your e-commerce business.
Topics Covered in This Episode
- About Anthony Lee
- How to Integrate NFTs into your E-commerce Offering
- Examples of Online Retailers Combining NFTs with their Offerings
- Successful Implementation of NFTs into E-commerce
- The Technicals on How you could Implement this Yourself
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Podcast Transcription
[00:00:00] Do you want your product seen by more buyers on Amazon, Etsy and other marketplaces? Do you want to get more traffic, make more sales and scale your brand? Welcome to the Signalytics Podcast – Signal Code Unlocked, where we discuss what signals are needed to send to your customers, to the algorithms, to the ad platforms in order to get your product seen, converting and profiting fast. With your host, former top 50 seller on all of Amazon the Professor Howard Thai,
[00:00:32] this is the Signalytics Podcast – Signal Code Unlocked. All right. Hello, assalamualaikum everyone and welcome to our podcast. And today we have Anthony Lee for taking out your time and we welcome you. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure. Definitely. All right. So, so I was, I was, I was requesting to, to have some intro and some kind of background.
[00:01:05] Yeah, sure, sure. Okay. Well obviously my name is Anthony Lee. I’ve been in the Amazon space since 2014, I started with ZonBlast that became SixLeaf, as well as a brand owner and seller myself, and then took on some consulting clients. Since then I’ve consulted for six, seven, even eight figure brands, run a handful of brands myself.
[00:01:36] And from SixLeaf, I went over. Helped to build the beginning stages of Signalytics. I’ve also worked with Helium 10 and canopy management in, I guess my professional career inside of the Amazon ecosystem. So that’s me. Awesome. Awesome. Great. So NFTs with eCommerce. So this is going be topic for like me and for everyone in Pakistan. So let’s get into it and we love to learn.
[00:02:14] Yeah, absolutely. I actually prepared a presentation. Yeah. If I’m able to share my screen, can I do that? Yes, please. Yes. All right. Let me know when you see it. I can see now. Okay, perfect. Okie dokie. So today I wanted to talk about how to bring web 3, to your Ecommerce business using entities in eCommerce.
[00:02:37] The reason that I really like this topic is I have really embraced decentralized finance blockchain. Crypto technology recently is just almost an obsession, and I know that NFTs represent an amazing technology and technological advancement. It also happens to be a really popular topic right now. The problem is, is there’s a whole lot of articles out there about how to, you know, do NFTS with eCommerce, but there aren’t a whole bunch of practical, I guess, illustrations.
[00:03:14] There’s not a whole lot of actual use cases that, that can show people as an example, there are some, but they’re hard to find. And then all of the articles kind of brush over the topic like, Hey, you should try NFTs, cuz this is what you can do with them, but they don’t tell you how. And they’re the ones that do tell you how they give you kind of bad advice leading you to marketplaces, where you can only do like one at a time.
[00:03:37] I’m all about options and solutions that scale with a business. So this is what this is gonna be about. All right. So real quick. I know I just introduced myself, but I didn’t go into detail here, introduction to me and this presentation. I’m Anthony Lee sold my own brands on Amazon consulted and then had worked with these fine companies, as well as you see on the screen. Today, what I want to talk about is how to integrate NFTs into your e-commerce offering examples of online retailers, combining NFTs with their offerings.
[00:04:13] Successful implementation of NFTs into e-commerce and the technicals on how you could implement this yourself. So this is gonna be some actual actionable steps here, so we’ll dive right in. All right. So first I wanna start with the examples, right? Because I think it’s really important for people to kind of see what has been done.
[00:04:36] The first example I have here is the board breakfast club. So this is, this is an NFT and coffee subs right. So users get a digital asset, the NFT, but they also get a monthly bag of coffee. Very, very cool concept, beautiful merger between something in eCommerce and NFTs. So early on users could mint an NFT on the website. But now I think they’ve all minted.
[00:05:03] So now you can only buy them on the secondary market, such as opensea and then how it works is really simple. If you have the NFT in your wallet, like if, if you have the token, then you can get the physical product. So it’s like a me, you know, it’s like a club membership. So users also get an NFT, which is a generative art piece.
[00:05:27] And essentially what that means is it randomly adds traits and mixes them up. So every image is, is unique and it changes things like the background and the food that’s being eaten, et cetera, et cetera. And this NFT also comes as a banner that fits the dimensions of a Twitter banner. I wonder why they would do that.
[00:05:47] So as you can see here is a really, really clever idea. Twitter happens to be a very big platform for crypto natives and blockchain enthusiasts. So, great free advertising from anybody that purchased the NFT. They put it up as their Twitter banner. And as you can see, plenty of people do. So this is an example of the roadmap to kind of show you like what direction they’re taking this.
[00:06:12] Right? They have plans for more physical merchandise, but they also have plans to have like physical coffee stands and even a physical clubhouse for people to hang out. All of this accessible by people who cn NFT, one of these non fungible tokens in their wallet. All right. So my second example is a company called NFTs.
[00:06:35] The NFTees is a digital image of a t-shirt, but it also comes with a physical t-shirt. So this is an example of those, right? The NFTs tend to be promotions for various crypto protocols. So essentially what happens is a lot of these protocols, they don’t have Merch, they don’t start out of the gate with merch.
[00:06:55] So somebody else can easily come in and make merch kind of promoting that protocol. And then all the people who are interested in that protocol who have invested in that token are happy to buy a t-shirt and even better that it’s an NFT of a t-shirt and then they also get the physical t-shirt. So this was a really good idea and they’ve been incredibly successful.
[00:07:18] Now, those two examples were NFT companies that are branching out into the real world. However, there are plenty of actual retailers who have also branched into the world of blockchain, right? So those two were already crypto companies, but big brands like Gucci, Nike, Pringles, Campbell soup, have all also introduced NFTs into their offering.
[00:07:40] And here’s a great example of a retailer using NFTs. Taco bell released an NFT directly to a secondary marketplace called Rarible. You go to Rarible and you buy one of these NFTs. It comes with a $500 gift card. So that was, I mean, that was really awesome kind of way to get crypto enthusiasts into the taco bell ecosystem.
[00:08:04] but I want to show you the success that smaller brands have had with NFT, right? Because the only stories we ever hear are about the, the Dolce & Gabbanas and the Adidas, you know, NFT projects, but let’s look at non multibillion dollar conglomerates and what they’ve managed to pull off. So liquid death was started by an ex Netflix employee, right.
[00:08:24] And they sell canned water. That’s, that’s their thing. They’re all about death to plastic. That’s where that name comes. Well, they released an NFT collection called the murder head death club. As you can see, they have transacted so far 786 Eth with their NFTs. And basically what that means is a little over a million dollars in today’s price actually after today.
[00:08:51] Sorry, when I did this, the price of Ethereum was $300, cheaper, $400 cheaper than it is now. So that that’s much closer to like 1.5 million dollars. That means that they’ve sold so many and other people have sold so many that a 1.5 million dollars has been transacted. They made a ton of money from selling them directly and they also get royalties from the resale of all of those.
[00:09:17] So it was a very successful project for them. And an extra source of revenue, another smaller brand, the hundreds, which was founded in 2003 by a couple of law school classmates, and they sell streetwear. They came out with an NFT project called the Adam bomb squad. They’ve done 29 million dollars in volume with these NFTs and the least expensive NFT you can buy right now is $400, sorry.
[00:09:47] After the updating price, closer to like $450, $450 is the cheapest image that you can buy of this. So they’ve made a ton of money. That’s more revenue. And again, this is from a smaller company. This isn’t, you know, owned by a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. And then my last example is big face coffee. It was founded by an NBA athlete in 2019, and they sell coffee.
[00:10:12] Well, they released NFTs that included physical coffee, right? So it was an NFT box. You get this image and then on top of that, you get coffee, just like the, the, the board breakfast club example. They only made 500 units and they sold out 500 bucks a piece. So I would say for first shot at NFTs. Smaller Shopify site that was pretty successful implementation and they got to also offload some of their inventory, which is gonna inevitably bring people back for subscriptions of more coffee.
[00:10:45] So that was, I would say, very successful implementation of a smaller brand using that team. So most of the advice that you’ll get on how to actually implement NFTs technically is to go directly to a secondary marketplace. The problem that I have with that is they don’t accommodate most of the time.
[00:11:05] They don’t accommodate large uploads of collections, right? So they want you to do tiny collections, not 10,000 NFT collections, which I think is super limiting. And I don’t understand that. And then also you get information from everybody that buys, but what you don’t get is to kind of route it to your own database.
[00:11:25] I mean, On opensea you might be able to cuz they have an API, but I’m not sure that it gives you that information. Anyway. I think it’s a lot easier for you to own your own database. So here’s some, here are some avenues you can take as a business owner to implement NFTs into your offerings. All right.
[00:11:44] So the first one is called zero code NFT. This is actually a service of developers that will create for you a mint site, which is a website where people can go and mint an NFT, and then they deploy your smart contract that allows them to mint your NFT. So you own all that information. It’s on your own website, your, your servers, everything is yours.
[00:12:07] These guys are just gonna set it up for you. I think that’s really, really. And then from there, you know, you get all that data from your buyers and you can do whatever you want with it. The wallet addresses and any other information that you require from them. The next one is Niftykit. Niftykit has their own platform, but you can use their platform, set it up, and then people can go to their platform and, and mint your NFTs.
[00:12:31] And then my favorite new option, this is actually a very recent offering from shopify. And so how Shopify works, it is they don’t mint your NFTs for you, but they have an integration with other NFT mint apps and they’ll help you to connect with them, get it set up so that your Shopify site also allows for people to mint the, your entities.
[00:12:58] And then from there, Shopify offers token gated functionality for NFT holders, which I think is super huge because I mean, essentially then you can date sections of your website. You can make sure that only NFT holders take advantage of perks. They get free product or, or discounts, et cetera. And we’ll go over that in the next section, which is ideas for implementation now that you know how to set up an NFT contract.
[00:13:34] And by the way, all of. supposes that you’ve already gotten the, the art done. If you want me to go into deeper detail about how to do that part of it, I can after, but imagining you’ve got access to art through an artist, or you have a generative program or whatever that part’s taken care of, then you can set up the contract and then you move on to here.
[00:13:58] So what are the ideas for implementation? Loyalty rewards. Right? So NFT holders, you can do airdrops, which means you automatically deposit other NFTs or other crypto into their wallet. Their other crypto wallet, you can give early access to new products, lifetime discounts, as long as an NFT holder has the NFT in their wallet.
[00:14:22] You can set it up to where they can always come and enjoy certain discounts because they’re a member of the club. Stored value, you can put rewards points on these NFTs, which they can then redeem for whatever, and then offer free products. So that’s just one, one aspect that is still very much not explored yet, which is using NFT for loyalty rewards.
[00:14:49] You can also use it for future utility. This is like, if you hire developers and you really want to go deep on this, you can set up a metaverse game, right. A game in, in, in one of the many metaverses that exist currently, or hire developers to build your own, you can also do metaverse objects, right? So like branded merch inside of other existing metaverse games.
[00:15:17] and then metaverse perks. So here’s an example, cuz that, that might seem like a, an odd concept. There’s a game currently called decentral land, which is a metaverse game that you can, that users can currently go into and play. You can buy land, which is in the form of an NFT on decentraland and then use their developer tools to build like a building or something and then give NFT holders access to your
[00:15:46] Like clubhouse or whatever into central land. So that’s just an example, some higher level stuff you can do in web three as a brand owner. And then one of the most popular things that currently people are doing is offering real world perks, right? So I think AMC or some other, some other big theater offered NFTs, which give holders certain perks that give, get them access to venues.
[00:16:14] I know Coachella did this, right? You buy the NFT and then you have access to, I think, however many Coachella’s in the future. Anybody that’s been in the Amazon space for a while and knows the founders of helium 10, Manny Coats and his partner G they started an NFT project and part of their real world perks for NFT holders is an mastermind.
[00:16:39] So there’s just so many opportunities for a crossover between brands e-commerce and amenities. And that’s, that’s the presentation that I have for you. All right. So yeah, I have been for the Manny Coats project, like Bulls [00:17:00] and Apes and the perks. Great. They like, they are, if you buy it, then they will get you tokens after like 30 or.
[00:17:12] And if you hold like they do, I believe 10 or 30 tokens get like 600 tokens, then you can buy another. And from that token and they give you access or their discord group. Which they have investors in which they have like, like some billionaires and millionaires who offer joint ventures and some venture.
[00:17:40] That is a really good, good project they are doing. So because I have, I am also in the NFT world. So I have been like doing a lot is happening in the world. So that was a really good credit for this. And let’s, let’s like if a brand, like he has couple of products, like three to five products in on Amazon because here in Pakistan and they would like to jump into this NFT world and they can, they want to their brand to NFT.
[00:18:25] So what. Just sorry, you keep cutting in and out and I’m trying to stick together. Oh, I’m sorry. The, the question. I’m sorry, but I was unable to, I’m afraid. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Let me repeat. I was saying that what would be their first, if they would like to jump into their brand to NFT. I think I got all of that.
[00:18:50] It, it still cut out a little bit, but I think I got it. So what’s the first step for a brand owner with a small amount of products that they sell on Amazon. So I think the first step, the easiest step for newer smaller seller would be to get a Shopify site up. And then I would go the Shopify route. Just because the other stuff requires a little bit more of a budget and some more long, like some more commitment to getting other team members involved in the future.
[00:19:22] So the first step for a smaller seller, I think would be to get a Shopify setup. Once you have your offerings on Shopify, you really wanna flesh out, like, why, why do you want an NFT? What are you gonna do with it? Right. If it’s, if you’re doing an NFT. To compliment your physical products brand, then, you know, you want to figure out exactly what perks it’s gonna offer.
[00:19:51] And then you also want to figure out what it’s gonna look like. You’re gonna need to hire a, uh, An artist, unless you already are one or you have one on staff already, you wanna hire an artist because there needs to be some type of representation, digital representation for whatever it is you’re offering.
[00:20:07] And then you can do like the coffee and you can sell it and it can represent X amount of physical product. If you want. Where you can implement one of the rewards ideas. And I think the easiest way to do that is through Shopify. And it’s just an extra perk. And it allows you to attract people who are crypto enthusiast into your ecosystem, that you might not find them as Amazon shoppers, but you could find them, you know, over here doing all the crypto stuff.
[00:20:33] And they’re like, oh, I like, I like NFTs. And I also like this product, and then you. Open up that new market segment. And I would say Shopify is the easiest. If you happen to be a brand owner that maybe you yourself or somebody on your staff is like a phenomenal artist and you actually feel like you could just make money with the art as a new revenue stream, don’t do the Shopify route this time.
[00:21:02] You’re gonna want to get a mint site set up. I would go with the zero code, uh, it’s $800 for a contract. If the whole goal is primarily to generate revenue through the NFT, cuz maybe like the art is just phenomenal and people are gonna wanna, you know, buy it for that reason. Or if you happen to be a developer or you happen to have a developer who knows how to do stuff with, uh, a three 3d or, or, or gaming or anything like that, you could even have a roadmap that includes.
[00:21:35] Some type of game in the future, that’s the case. And then you would also want to set up a mint site. So people have an asset that they can then pull into the metaverse. But were you at, I think you said something about a minimum of 10,000 Net. Yeah. Yeah. Are you saying, is that the minimum that no, I think both to have 10,000.
[00:22:03] Is it, is it, did you say, is it customary? Compulsory. It’s compulsory. Oh yeah. No, you can have as many, you can have as many in the collection as you want, or as few 10,000. The reason why a lot of people do 10,000 is because, okay, so NFT art can be, what’s called a one to one, which means this is a unique piece that somebody creates.
[00:22:29] But it can also be generative. And how it’s generative is there are programs out there. So some genius created this program at Python, and since then people have found have replicated it and now you can buy it from anybody that’s a vendor, but this program essentially how it works is you draw or you have an artist that draws a singular trait, right?
[00:22:52] A hat, a set of sun glasses. And then like the outline of a body. And then each trait has variations. Like the body is, you know, five different colors, right? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 colors, and then five different sets of clothing and then five different head pieces, a bunch of different color hair, et cetera. Those are all traits.
[00:23:13] You end up with a couple hundred traits and you put it in this generative program and it cycles through various combinations of the background of the, you know, skin color, the hair color, of the accessories on the head of the accessories on the face. And, and because there’s so many combinations you can, I mean, you can, you can have it run for thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands, and each one will be different.
[00:23:45] So 10,000 just kind of became like a standard number just because you don’t want to go crazy. Right? Like you can’t go out there with a hun, like a hundred thousand, just seems like too much. A lot of projects actually go for a thousand or less, but you can do more cuz of these generative programs now.
[00:24:02] Okay. So I think there are, let’s casual this again, because I don’t know my internet. Would like to thank you. Thank you. Taking of your time today. Hey, thank thank you for having me. I, and I’m sorry for whatever network issues are, are there? I really hope that I don’t know. Somebody, somebody creates an NFT project because of this.
[00:24:29] That’d be cool. Oh, sure. Uh, requesting you to come again, we will be talking on this again. Really soon. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Sorry for, for the internet issue. Thank you. Bye bye. Do you want your product seen by more buyers on Amazon, Etsy and other marketplaces? Do you want to get more traffic, make more sales and scale your brand? [00:25:01] Welcome to the Signalytics Podcast – Signal Code Unlocked, where we discuss what signals are needed to send to your customers, to the algorithms, to the ad platforms in order to get your product seen, converting and profiting fast. With your host, former top 50 seller on all of Amazon the Professor Howard Thai, this is the Signalytics Podcast – Signal Code Unlocked.