Make it Big Podcast: The Future of Retail in the Metaverse

Welcome to The Make it Big Podcast, a bi-weekly audio series about all things ecommerce by BigCommerce.

In September 2022, GDR Creative Intelligence CEO, Kate Ancketill, gave a keynote at the Make it Big 2022 conference about commerce trends in the Metaverse and what we can look forward to in the future. 

Ancketill’s fascinating presentation is now available on the Make it Big Podcast.

Read on for a recap of this episode to learn more about the potential of the Metaverse.

All episodes of The Make it Big Podcast are available on Spotify, Apple and Google.  

The Make it Big Podcast: Episode 31

Pablo Gallaga: Kate, thank you for joining us today. Please tell us all about the metaverse.

Kate Ancketill: “Thank you, Pablo. Let’s start with a few basics, just in case anyone wants to get up to speed with a few building blocks. All these metaverses… there isn’t just one… there’s many thousands of them. They are best experienced in three dimensions, unlike, say, Second Life, which you’ve looked at as a TV screen in two dimensions, Web 2 style.”

“And of course, we’re now looking at Web 3.0, which is best experienced with VR headsets. So, the whole Mark Zuckerberg thing about the future in his view of the internet will be that it will be embodied, three dimensional. You’ll feel like you’re in it and participating in it. It will feel much more real than we do now where we’re just looking at something from the outside in 2D.

“You can make this world yourself, you can charge people to enter your spaces, you can make serious money.” 

“Another difference is that you can make serious money and you, as a user, are also a creator. So it is user generated to a very large extent, which was not quite so much the case with the likes of The Sims, etc.. So I was interested to read that the CEO of Fortnite, which is owned by Epic Games, recently said that 50% of the gameplay that goes on in Fortnite is created by other users, not created by Epic.

“So that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. You can make this world yourself, you can charge people to enter your spaces, you can make serious money. So that’s very interesting for entrepreneurial young people, of course. 

“It’s also based on the blockchain, which these previous worlds were not. And I think the key and the crucial point for us marketers is that the Metaverse of today or the many metaverses can be very much a bridge between the real world and the Metaverse world.”

“And that can be through earning real money salaries, whether it be in cryptocurrency, that you then change into real money or whether you’re actually kind of in education or you’re learning all sorts of things where you’re buying food and it’s being delivered to your real house. So there is an absolute connection now in many ways, which we’re going to look at between these modern metaverses and perhaps the metaverse style worlds of old.”

Be sure to also check out more episodes of The Make it Big Podcast on Spotify, Apple and Google.