If you’re seeking to grow your Shopify store and its community, there’s never been a better time than in 2022. With an already abundant choice of Shopify apps and marketing tools, extending your audience reach is easier than ever.

But if you want to truly break out from the pack and enter a forty billion dollar (and rapidly expanding) market, then you should consider offering Digital Collectibles (DCs) alongside your products. Best of all, the shopping experience does not need to involve Bitcoin or crypto, most apps that integrate with Shopify to offer Digital Collectibles will only require the customer to have a free MetaMask wallet which takes a minute to set up.

To help us better visualise how these benefits might apply in an online store scenario, let’s imagine you run a Rock Climbing Experience business. The store offers Outdoor Climbing Experiences, Training Courses, Climbing Equipment and Branded Merchandise for sale.

Taking a look at the benefits of Digital Collectibles:

1. Increase your store’s revenue potential

Using our store example, you could offer a digital twin (Digital Collectible) alongside each physical product: T-shirts, water bottles, chalk bags, climbing shoes and more.

Offering a Digital Collectible bundle alongside your products (or experiences) can be a simple way to instantly double your inventory and upsell any product, allowing for increased revenue and profit potential.

The digital artwork itself can be as simple as a picture of the product, a featured design found on the product, your store’s logo or anything you like.

2. Reward your community

Digital Collectibles are much more than just a digital asset. They can offer utility and add value to your customer’s purchases, turning any token into a discount code or granting exclusive access to a product or services only to token holders.

Your Climbing store could offer a 15% discount on all Climbing Experiences to anyone with 5 tokens for example, or 25% off if you own 10 or more.

Or maybe you’d like to offer an exclusive Climbing Experience only available to token holders which have acquired the Digital Collectibles bundled in all your other Climbing Experience packages.

3. Create loyalty and gain insight into customer behaviour

As you probably know, repeat customers are more likely to spend more money. Customers who are being constantly rewarded and granted access to exclusive products or services are more likely to be repeat customers.

Digital Collectibles also present a unique opportunity to gain insight into your customer’s behaviour and easily change up your offerings or bundles to incentivise sales and maximise profit.

For example, if you find that more climbing shoes are being sold as a result of the rewards you’ve set up with their Digital Collectible offerings, you could easily apply similar token rewards to an underperforming product or service.

4. Offer an exciting new product

While we’re still in the early days of Digital Collectibles adoption, these tokens have caused great excitement and innovation in the digital space.

It feels like the last time there was this much commotion in the space, was back in the early days of Facebook.

5. Enter the collectibles market

They’re like trading cards but with a massive value add. There’s a massive market in the digital collector space, which grew by 1,785% in 2021 alone.

A key reason for the popularity and growth in Digital Collectibles is their ease of tradability from anywhere in the world. In fact, they have quickly become one of the most traded digital instruments.

Even after the recent crypto crash, DC sales continue to increase. The bottom line: Digital Collectibles are still hot!

6. Be discovered on OpenSea (the world’s largest Digital Collectibles marketplace)

As soon as a Digital Collectible product is claimed by your customer, it will appear on OpenSea in your store’s collection.

If you’re unfamiliar with OpenSea, it’s like eBay or Amazon for Digital Collectibles. All of the biggest Digital Collectibles collections (Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, Decentraland) trade on the platform.

Every Digital Collectibles sold by your store contains your product and your store metadata that can be viewed on OpenSea, including: Product name, description, store name, date purchased, and more.

This allows any of the 1 million users browsing the marketplace to find their way back to your online store or view all the DCs in your store’s collection!

7. Free advertising on the Metaverse

The metaverse is one of the biggest opportunities for businesses since the creation of the internet. They’re digital ecosystems like Decentraland, The Sandbox, HyperVerse and more.

Most Digital Collectibles are metaverse-ready, allowing your dedicated community to showcase your DC products in their virtual spaces and share them with even more audiences.

For example, climbing enthusiasts would be able to upload their Digital Collectibles to a virtual gallery, displaying each pair of climbing shoes they’ve owned from the moment they began their climbing journey, reflecting their climbing technique progression. Or they can show off the Digital Collectibles earned by completing certain climbing experiences you offer. Their climber friends will be jealous.

And remember, every DC links back to your store and collection!

8. Highly scalable and cost neutral

One key point to remember is that unlike traditional physical products, DCs are a digital asset. The list of benefits between physical and digital products are in a category of their own, however the main advantages are in ease of scalability and cost neutrality (with significant profit margin potential).
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There’s no stock or inventory to track and zero risk on shipping damages or returns, unlike their physical counterparts.

9. Customers don’t need to disclose private information

Web3 allows users to have a single profile that works across multiple platforms. Users will own their profile and related data without sharing it with the company. However, if they choose to do so, the data can be more easily shared, its accuracy can be verified, and the data can even be sold to advertisers or brands.

All that’s needed for a customer to claim a Digital Collectibles is to use their crypto wallet address and not your customer’s private information.

10. Get a head start building your Web3 presence

Having an established community with your Digital Collectible products is a big step toward building a Web3 business presence. Largely seen as the future of the internet, it’s where applications become smarter, more private, and more decentralised.

Don’t miss the opportunity of building a community for your product types first, as you can always evolve your store to become fully Web3 capable in the future, and your existing community can access even more of your offerings.