In this blog post, we walk you through the process of buying an item using the Boson Protocol decentralized application.
Buying products from Boson marketplaces allows you to buy physical – or phygital – items in an entirely Web3-native way.
Boson Protocol’s settlement layer secures the commercial exchange of on-chain value for real-world assets. You can be certain that when redeeming you will either receive the physical good or your money back
The Boson Protocol dApp (decentralized application) is currently deployed to Polygon. This means that you will need MATIC (the native Polygon currency) in your wallet in order to pay transaction fees, which will be minimal.
Search for the item you want
Browse available products by clicking the Explore Products link in the navigation bar. You can filter by brand, category or seller, or search for keywords in the listing.
Connect your wallet and commit
Connect your wallet to the dApp. Read the message when connecting. This will not cost you anything in fees. Allow your wallet to switch to the Polygon network before connecting.
Once you have found an item you want to buy, click on the Commit button on the listing. This is the first step of the process. Your wallet will again ask you to sign the Commit transaction. When Committing, the item price will be transferred into escrow and you will receive a redeemable NFT (rNFT) that can be exchanged for the real-world item it represents.
You can hold, transfer or easily trade your rNFT on the secondary market, for example on OpenSea.
Redeem your NFT
The product listing displays a redemption period during which your rNFT is valid. If you do not redeem your item within this time, the seller’s commitment to send it will lapse and you will lose your buyer deposit. During the redemption period, you are free to trade, sell or gift the rNFT.
When you are ready to take possession of the physical item, go back to the dApp to redeem your rNFT. The rNFT will be destroyed in the process.
When you click Redeem, you will see an overlay detailing the fair exchange policy before you can click Next to proceed.
You need to enter your address in order to redeem your purchase. Unlike when you buy something on a Web 2.0 commerce site, your address is not stored in a centralized database. Instead, you are sharing your details only with the seller of the item you have purchased.
In order to facilitate sharing your address with the seller, you need to initialize a chat session with XMTP, which is a Web3 communication tool. Click the Initialize button in the overlay and you will be prompted to sign a transaction in your wallet to indicate that you are happy to communicate via XMTP.
The next screen is a confirmation screen to ensure you are happy with how you have entered your address and to tell you that you have initialized your chat client.
You will again see a warning message that your rNFT will be destroyed on redemption.
Once you are happy with all of this, confirm the transaction in your wallet and the redemption step is complete.
Finally, you will be shown the confirmation overlay letting you know that your redemption is complete.
You will notice that the item you have purchased now no longer has the Redeem option available. If you need to contact the seller or raise a problem, you can do so via the two links on the page shown below, which will again initialize the chat client.
Happy (decentralized) shopping at bosonapp.io!
