Some Thoughts On Using Hive For E-Commerce
Web3 has so far not seen wide adoption by businesses outside the crypto domain.
There are a number of reasons for this; over-complexity, a relatively small audience, lack of tools to segregate customers by demography or geography, lack of business-focused apps, etc. Businesses aren't seeing any outreach from Web3, and I feel there's a general lack of mutual understanding.
If you want to see what I mean, just look at the adverts that appear in Brave - it's almost entirely for crypto services or for online games, I've seen hardly any mainstream businesses or household names.
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So I sat down and thought about how (and if) I could find a way to use Hive within my own business.
The business I own is very much a micro-business. It's pure e-commerce selling relatively niche hobby products, and focused on the UK market.
What are the obstacles ?
There are a number of barriers I need to consider;
- My business aims at UK customers, but Hive has no geographical segregation.
- The number of Hive users who are interested in the hobby products I sell is low.
- As a crypto user myself, I'm very aware of privacy issues - both my own privacy and that of my customers and viewers.
- As a micro-business, the biggest constraints I have are time and budget.
- I haven't seen many Hive tools or apps that are aimed to help businesses selling tangible goods.
- My customer base is quite traditionalist and many of them are highly resistant to the idea of using cryptocurrency as a payment method.
So how could I use Hive ?
I think the best way I could use Hive would be as a content creation medium. The method would be to create posts in Hive and videos on 3Speak - product unboxings, "how to" guides, images and information on new products, etc. These would build up over time to become a library of useful hobby-related information.
The way I'd use this collection of Hive posts would be to link to them from my website, email newsletters, Facebook etc.
Using Hive in this way has all kinds of advantages that I can think of;
- It solves the issue of trying to find a pure Hive audience for a relatively niche product range.
- Having a library of Hive posts is a far safer and more permanent medium than content crated somewhere like YouTube or similar.
- It means I'm not using Hive to "hard sell" to fellow Hivers, and thus solves the issue of geography.
- By regularly giving Hive links to my customers, it might just bring in a few new users to Hive.
- It's providing information to my customers via Hive, it's not explicitly pushing anything to do with crypto or crypto payments.
- While doing this would require a significant and consistent time commitment, it would be relatively low cost and might even make money from curation rewards received (assuming people in Hive find the posts interesting !)
Points to consider
There are a few things about this idea that I haven't fully solved or reached conclusions on.
The first and maybe most important is the structure. Would it work best to set up a separate Hive account for it to keep business and personal separate (especially from a tax perspective !), or would it be better to use my existing Hive account ?
My business is legally required (by UK law) to publish my name, address and telephone number. While I don't think I say much that's hugely controversial in Hive, I'm wary of doing something which enables my Hive identity to be so easily connected to my "real world" identity. What do you think ?
Another question is whether I should create a dedicated Community in Hive (whether linked to a new business account, or my existing one), or post to existing relevant ones. Each method has advantages and disadvantages !
Finally, I wonder how this would interact with my website's in-site blog, which I must admit I don't use as much as I should anyway, mainly because the products are the main focus of the site and the blog is relatively low profile in relation to them.
I'm not yet sure if I'll go ahead with this plan (mainly because of the time commitment needed), but I'd love to hear any feedback you've got on this idea ! Are there ways to work within Hive that I've missed, or tools I don't know about ?
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Had my first HIVE rent payment from a tenant a couple of rent days ago.
Interesting ! I appreciate you can't give too much away to preserve confidentiality, but it would be fascinating to find out if this was because someone's making enough on Hive to start covering living expenses, or if it was because they're powering down, using Hive to cover a shortage of other funds or some other one-off thing.
It was a situation where someone had powered down and forgot about it. When bringing it to their attention they asked about my interest in them. Rent payment was suggested to keep things legal (not being a broker to buy them outright).
Well, ALL RIGHT!
A lot of good ideas here ... my suggestion would just be to set up a different Hive account. A good example to use would be @danielhuhservice; I won't reveal his other account because the point is the BUSINESS account!
Thank you ! Yes - the more I think about it, the more I think a separate account would work better.
You know, as said in another comment, the best thing to do would be to set up a new account specificaly for that content.
A community would be cool, but hold off and see how the community reacts and interacts to the account. If there seems to be some interest in that niche, then work on the community to allow others to post there.
I wonder if you'd potentially be able to take your blog style posts from Hive after they've been published, to then use on your own site. At the very least linking to Hive from there could be the safest bet.
Also, the idea of allowing people from outside to get to know Hive is a great idea and a good way to potentially onboard new users. Those users could potentially find your community as something of a landing pad for them.
What type of stuff does your business center around? I'm assuming model making/ costume design. As I remember speaking with you before about both of those hobbies.
I used to work in a hobby shop, that centered around model making, it was a cool place and had some very regular/ loyal costumers, but it was fairly niche. Train enthusiasts, and diorama makers.
Thanks for the reply ! Yeah, I think you're right about the community thing. Running that as well could be an additional complication, as well as creating a silo where both the content and my customers don't get full exposure to Hive.
As long as the content is all mine, there would be no reason not to cross-post - after all, it's my own IP ! But I think I'd try to find a way to do it with links so that people seeing it on the site or in newsletters still have to come across to Hive.
You're spot on about the business - it's a kind of amalgam of modelling, tabletop wargaming and RPG goodies, mostly focusing on the "consumables" (paints, brushes, weathering products etc) as well as miniatures. And yeah, it's pretty niche 😁
Great idea. It would add to the poor marketing Hive has.
Definitely one of my thoughts ! If I can bring in people interested in the niche, then it's good for Hive and might just be the kind of people who would upvote me a bit as well. I like a bit of mutually-beneficial selfishness 😁
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I agree with the others that from a business side, a new account would keep things separate and easier for this.
You could look at either redirecting your site blog to your hive page, or mirroring the content in the page. There used to be a WordPress integration for hive though I'm not sure how updated that has been kept.
Thank yo u! Yep, it does seem to be the consensus, and matches my feelings. I'll have to look into the Wordpress integration, although it might be just as easy to just copy & paste.