Technology for MSMEs: After Amazon and Flipkart, e-commerce firm Meesho might quickly embrace blockchain-based use circumstances to enhance the digital expertise of consumers and sellers on its platform. E-commerce is arguably the subsequent frontier in redefining on-line sale and buy of products by way of blockchain-based metaverse, web3, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and different use circumstances. Hence, digital-native platforms are seemingly eager to discover blockchain which is taken into account to be the holy grail of belief and safety.
“I do see a lot of promise here for buyers and sellers on Meesho interacting in the metaverse. The only question probably is when is it going to happen. It’s just about the timing of the adoption of the metaverse. It is slightly early for us but we have started exploring Web3 and extension of that — the overall metaverse,” Sanjeev Barnwal, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Meesho instructed Financial Express Online in an interview.
The use case, as an example, making certain the standard of the product, mentioned Barnwal, must be explored in an e-commerce context. “Blockchain can be leveraged to build trust in some form or the other. Now, how do you draw parallels of that to e-commerce? Can we build trust around the quality of a product through blockchain? Maybe but we haven’t found a solution yet,” he mentioned.
At its core, blockchain is actually a shared database with varied entries verified and encrypted that can’t be edited or tampered. The information is secured by way of cryptography in blockchain with every community participant having his/her personal personal keys that act as a private digital signature to their transactions.
However, blockchain to change into ubiquitous in e-commerce will take a while. “If metaverse becomes the norm, you can do lots of things like simulating offline buying experience online. Fundamentally, how you think about e-commerce itself changes. It will be a game-changer in terms of user experience as well,” mentioned Barnwal. The firm, on Tuesday, had introduced crossing the 6-lakh micro-and-small-seller milestone on its platform, recording a 7X enhance from round 86,000 sellers since April 2021. Meesho is targetting to achieve 12 lakh sellers by finish of 2022.
Earlier this month, Meesho had additionally tied up with Google Cloud to leverage the latter’s infrastructure to drive elevated operational effectivity. Meesho mentioned Google Cloud will assist in advancing the corporate’s synthetic intelligence and machine studying capabilities for demand forecasting and stock optimization. Through Google Cloud, Meesho mentioned it is going to additionally optimize its transactional information and enhance productiveness with real-time insights into consumers’ buying exercise.
In April this 12 months, Walmart-owned Flipkart had additionally launched Flipkart Labs to check Web3 and Metaverse use-cases with real-world functions, together with NFT-related use-cases, digital storefronts, and so on., with the intention to enhance the general buying expertise for its clients.
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On the opposite hand, Seattle-headquartered Amazon’s AWS had launched a metaverse-like recreation referred to as Cloud Quest in March this 12 months to coach customers on AWS. In July final 12 months, Amazon’s Payment Acceptance & Experience workforce had posted a job to rent a digital forex and blockchain product lead at its headquarters, indicating the corporate’s doable experiment in enabling cryptocurrencies for accepting funds from clients in close to future.
Meanwhile, Meesho can be exploring the federal government’s pet on-line mission Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) which is pitched to show e-commerce into an open digital infrastructure as an alternative of being dominated by massive marketplaces comparable to Amazon, Flipkart, and others in India. The departure from the platform-centric method to an open-source framework is the mainstay right here.
“It opens up more opportunities for SMEs. It makes the ecosystem more open, which means people can now build integrations and can get access to a lot more suppliers. Suppliers joining ONDC will probably be able to become part of multiple e-commerce platforms at once. We are definitely in touch with them (ONDC) and our team is working closely with them. We’ll see how this pans out. We are extremely bullish on this,” added Barnwal with out disclosing particulars on the corporate’s plans for the ONDC community.
Meesho had final 12 months forayed into the direct-to-consumer (D2C) enterprise to compete with Amazon, Flipkart and different marketplaces in promoting on to shoppers as an alternative of solely being a reselling platform. “Because of our focus on end customers in the last 1.5 years, our business has grown 5X in the last one year. All of that translates into success for suppliers. So this growth has been powered by end customers and suppliers have been benefiting a lot out of it,” Barnwal mentioned in his response to the query on the seemingly influence of its D2C foray on its resellers.
The firm has to this point raised $1.1 billion in funding with the final spherical of $570 million raised in September 2021 from SoftBank, Prosus Ventures, Fidelity Investments, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital and others, as per information from Crunchbase, at a reported valuation of close to $5 billion. Meesho had reportedly laid off 150 individuals from its grocery enterprise Meesho Superstore amid its integration into the primary app. As per information experiences, 5,000-6000 individuals have been laid off by round a dozen Indian startups this 12 months as far as give attention to profitability takes centre stage other than the subdued funding situation.
Source: www.financialexpress.com”