The Metaverse Will Radically Change How We Shop

The First Thing You'll Buy in the Metaverse Won't Be a Pair of Shoes

It will be a version of yourself.

Not a profile picture. Not a filter. A full, three dimensional, real time version of your body that moves when you move, looks the way you decide to look, and walks into a store that exists nowhere on Earth. You will try on clothes that do not exist, pay with money that has no physical form, and walk out holding nothing in your hands. And yet, when you log off, you will feel like you actually bought something.

That is the consumer future Rhonda Hadi, Shiri Melumad, and Eric S. Park describe in their 2023 paper for the Journal of Consumer Psychology. The paper has already accumulated 351 citations, which suggests that academics are scrambling to understand something that is already arriving faster than most of us realize. The authors do not claim the Metaverse is coming. They claim it is already reshaping three fundamental pillars of consumer behavior: who we think we are, who influences us, and what it means to own something.

The Metaverse, as Hadi, Melumad, and Park define it, is not virtual reality. It is not a game. It is a specific convergence of five elements: it must be digitally mediated, spatial, immersive, shared, and real time. Remove any one of those, and you have something else. A Zoom call is real time and shared, but not spatial or immersive. A VR headset demo is immersive but not shared. The Metaverse is all five at once, and that combination changes the psychology of shopping in ways that e commerce never could.

Your Identity Becomes a Product You Can Edit

The most unsettling finding in this paper is not about technology. It is about the self.

In physical retail, you walk into a store as yourself. Your height, your skin, your age, your gait. You can change your clothes, your posture, your expression, but the fundamental container is fixed. The Metaverse breaks that container open. Hadi, Melumad, and Park argue that because consumers can create and modify avatars at will, identity itself becomes a fluid, purchasable commodity. You are no longer shopping as yourself. You are shopping for a self you want to try on.

The authors point to research on the Proteus Effect, a phenomenon where people adopt the behavioral traits of their avatars. If your avatar is tall and confident, you start acting taller and more confident in the virtual space. That is not just a curiosity. It means that when you shop in the Metaverse, you are not satisfying the desires of your actual self. You are satisfying the desires of a self you are currently inhabiting. And that self can change from one session to the next.

Consider what this does to brand loyalty. If your identity is fluid, your preferences become fluid too. A person who buys minimalist furniture for their physical apartment might spend thousands on neon, maximalist decor for their virtual living room, because the avatar that lives there has different tastes. Hadi, Melumad, and Park describe this as a fundamental shift from "who I am" to "who I am right now." Brands that treat consumers as stable personalities will fail. Brands that treat identity as a subscription will win.

The paper does not go into this, but the implication is stark: the Metaverse may accelerate the fragmentation of the self that social media already began. On Instagram, you curate a version of yourself. In the Metaverse, you become that version. The gap between the real and the performed narrows until it is hard to tell which self is actually making the purchase.

Social Influence Becomes a Crowd You Can Touch

We already know that other people affect what we buy. That is the entire premise of influencer marketing, social proof, and peer recommendation. But Hadi, Melumad, and Park identify something different about social influence in the Metaverse. It is not mediated. It is embodied.

In a typical online shopping experience, you see a review from "User123" or a photo of a model wearing a jacket. In the Metaverse, you stand next to a friend who is wearing the jacket. You see how it moves when they move. You can ask them to turn around. You can watch them bump into a virtual table and see whether the fabric wrinkles. The authors describe this as "shared spatial presence," which is a technical way of saying that social influence now happens in the same room, even though the room is made of code.

The paper draws on a long history of research showing that physical proximity increases persuasion. People trust a recommendation more when they hear it face to face versus through a screen. The Metaverse collapses that distinction. You are not reading a recommendation. You are watching a friend try something on, three feet away, in real time.

But here is where it gets strange. The friend might not be real. Hadi, Melumad, and Park note that the Metaverse allows for "synthetic social influence," where brands or algorithms create realistic avatars that behave like friends. These avatars can laugh at your jokes, compliment your outfit, and recommend products, all while being entirely artificial. The authors do not claim this is deceptive. They simply note that consumers will struggle to distinguish between genuine social influence and manufactured social influence, and that blurring has consequences for trust.

The methodology behind this section of the paper is worth noting. The authors synthesized findings from consumer psychology, human computer interaction, and virtual reality research. They did not run a single experiment. Instead, they built a conceptual framework by connecting dots across disciplines. That makes the paper less about proving a specific effect and more about mapping a territory. The territory is large, and the map is preliminary, but the direction is clear: social influence in the Metaverse will be more powerful and harder to audit than anything we have seen online.

Ownership Becomes a Question Without a Clear Answer

This is where the paper gets genuinely philosophical, and also where the practical implications are most urgent.

In the physical world, ownership is straightforward. You buy a jacket, you own the jacket. You can wear it, sell it, burn it, or leave it in a closet. Ownership is a bundle of rights that the law protects. In the Metaverse, Hadi, Melumad, and Park argue, ownership becomes a psychological state rather than a legal one.

Consider a virtual handbag. You pay real money for it. You carry it in the Metaverse. Your friends see it and compliment it. You feel ownership. But the handbag exists on a server owned by a company. That company can delete it, change its appearance, or revoke your access. You do not actually own the handbag. You own a license to experience it, and that license can be revoked.

The authors describe this as "psychological ownership without legal ownership," and they suggest it will change how consumers value products. Research on the endowment effect shows that people value things more once they feel they own them. In the Metaverse, you will feel ownership for things you do not legally possess, and that feeling will drive spending. But it will also create vulnerability. If the platform shuts down or changes its terms, your entire wardrobe disappears.

The paper does not mention NFTs explicitly, but the logic fits. Non fungible tokens attempt to solve the ownership problem by putting virtual goods on a blockchain, making them portable across platforms. But Hadi, Melumad, and Park are skeptical that technology alone can resolve the psychological ambiguity. Even if you hold a token that proves you own a virtual jacket, you still need a platform to render that jacket. If the platform refuses, the jacket is useless. Ownership in the Metaverse is always contingent on someone else's cooperation.

This is not a minor concern. The global market for virtual goods was already worth over 50 billion dollars in 2020, and it is growing rapidly. People are spending serious money on things that exist only as data. The authors suggest that consumer behavior researchers need to develop a new vocabulary for ownership, one that accounts for the gap between feeling like you own something and actually owning it.

What the Research Does Not Prove

The paper is careful about its limits, and you should be careful too.

Hadi, Melumad, and Park do not claim that every consumer will adopt the Metaverse. They do not claim that physical retail will disappear. They do not claim that the effects they describe will apply equally to all demographics, cultures, or product categories. The paper is a theoretical framework, not an empirical prediction. It tells you what to look for, not what you will find.

There is also a question of timing. The Metaverse, as the authors define it, does not fully exist yet. Current platforms like Roblox, Fortnite, and VRChat hit some of the five criteria but not all. True real time shared spatial immersion at scale is still technically difficult. The paper is describing a destination, not a current reality. That means the consumer behaviors it predicts may take five years or twenty years to materialize, and they may look different than expected.

The authors also do not address the question of who builds the Metaverse. If a single company controls the dominant platform, the consumer dynamics will look very different than if the Metaverse is open and decentralized. The paper treats the Metaverse as a generic environment, but the specifics of governance, moderation, and access will shape every behavior the authors describe.

What the Research Actually Changes About How We Think About Shopping

The paper is not a prediction. It is a warning dressed as an opportunity. Here is what it actually means for consumers, brands, and anyone trying to understand where commerce is heading.

• ▸Identity is no longer a fixed input to shopping. It is a variable output. Brands need to design for multiple selves, not one. A consumer might be a minimalist in their physical home and a maximalist in their virtual one. Marketing that assumes consistency will miss the point.

• ▸Social influence will become ambient and hard to detect. When a friend recommends a product in the Metaverse, you will not know whether that friend is real, paid, or generated. Trust will become a scarce resource, and brands that are transparent about synthetic influence will have an advantage over those that hide it.

• ▸Ownership will feel real even when it is not legally enforceable. Consumers will spend real money on virtual goods, and they will feel genuine loss when those goods disappear. The law has not caught up. Until it does, consumers should assume that nothing they buy in the Metaverse is truly theirs.

• ▸The five criteria framework is a diagnostic tool, not a definition. If a platform is not spatial, immersive, shared, real time, and digitally mediated, it is not the Metaverse. Use these criteria to evaluate claims. Most companies talking about the Metaverse right now are describing something that meets two or three criteria at most.

• ▸The most important consumer behavior in the Metaverse will be the choice of avatar. That choice determines what you buy, who you trust, and how you feel about ownership. Treating the avatar as decoration is a mistake. It is the central consumer decision, and everything else follows from it.

The Metaverse will radically change how we shop. But the change will not be about convenience, speed, or selection. Those are the promises of e commerce. The Metaverse offers something stranger. It offers the chance to shop as someone else, in a place that does not exist, for things that are not quite yours. And it asks a question that consumer behavior has never had to answer: if you can be anyone, buy anything, and own nothing, what are you actually doing when you spend money?

The answer, according to Hadi, Melumad, and Park, is that you are building a self. The shopping is just how you pay for the construction.