On first sight it seems a good idea!
But I think there is a big problem.
The brands shop and vendors do make their offers in such way that they have restrictions. These restrictions at least partly are made to make customers buy more merchandise in order to use reward points thus i dont believe that big companies will be interested on participating. Because 360bn which are not redeemed is money which is not lost by companies.
Also PayPal backing caught my eye. This is a red flag for me in block chain community. Although I think there should be block-chain payment platform with buyer/seller protection. PayPal is something that have made my life very difficult because of their 0 tolerance policy regarding various matters and I hope block-chain will make a big dent in PayPal business some day.
Hi
There are three sources you gain points, one is Brands, Banks & Credit cards & Apps/Websites the system address all the above. Banks & credit card comapnies spend a lot of money in maintaining and running a catalog for redemptions to make their customers happy and this becomes an ease of access for the. APPs and game give you virtual tokens and even they are exploring real world rewards to make the users engaged more, but sine it is not their core business to run a eco-system for redemption, ALLOY is an interesting space for them to partner. Larger companies have known to participate in Coalition program (Airmiles - Canada, OK Cashbag - Korea, Nectar - UK, Plenti - USA), the main reason for it is when the reward points are issued it is an liability on their books and it need to taken off from onetime customers (This forms 75% of the total reward points issued) and Coalition has a upto 80% market penetration in all the geographies mentioned above and the reason for that is points flow and don't stay idle resulting in win-win driving business and satisfaction. The idea for any reward program is to make the users see value either within the store or external so the customer keeps coming back.
PayPal has incubated our startup since 2016 when we were offering Loyalty, CRM, gamification, Referral, systems for retail vendors, they also have plan for reward programs for their merchants but the distributed nature of their 17mn merchants makes it impossible to run a large scalehandshake, here is where they found the platform pretty interesting to explore
only on the reward point redemption and listing of their Merchants on the platform for visibility . Best,
Vijay
Team ALLOY
I have to say that you have some good arguments and right now I am becoming interested and will have to read more about your project.
Always good to have constructive discussion.
Thank for your extensive reply.