Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart launches metaverse shopping experience

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Flipkart has launched a metaverse space for consumers to discover and shop new products, the latest bet from the Indian e-commerce giant as it experiments with web3 offerings to supercharge its customer experience.

The Walmart-backed Bengaluru-headquartered firm has partnered with eDAO, a Polygon-incubated firm, to launch the metaverse offering, which it is calling Flipverse. The offering is in the pilot stage and aimed to garner interest during the festive season this month.

On Flipverse, which goes live on Flipkart’s Android app Monday, the company is offering “gamified, interactive and immersive” experiences for consumers where they will be able to collect the company’s loyalty points — Supercoins — as well as digital collectibles from partner brands.

At a briefing Monday, Flipkart said “a wide range of brands” including Puma, Noise, Nivea, Lavie, Tokyo Talkies, Campus, VIP, Ajmal Perfumes and Himalaya are partnering to set up experience theaters on Flipverse.

“The idea is to have millions of users experience Flipverse and open the doors to the future of shopping,” the company said. The company’s executives acknowledged that its web3 offerings are at an experimental stage, but they said they are confident that it has legs to eventually become a critical part of Flipkart’s future.

“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. Flipverse will be a vibrant, visible expression of the metaverse, and I’m proud that this activation is taking place on Polygon,” said Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, in a statement. The broader partnership with Flipkart is Polygon’s latest win to attract large brands. The Ethereum scaling platform has partnered with a number of firms including Stripe, Meta and Starbucks in recent months. 

(More to follow)

Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart launches metaverse shopping experience by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch



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