Hoq is it innovative?
Our founder Eran Eyal was recently asked how Shopin is different from two competitors who appear to be similar (Shping and Eligma)
Here's what he had to say (we'd link you directly to the comments on Telegram but BitcoinTalk removes posts that link there)
On Comparisons to Shping:"Fundamentally we are turning the open web and physical stores into a distributed Amazon by enabling them with our product recommendation engines and artificial intelligence.
We then work with retailers to give uses your data back so that that data can be re-served across the web to create the ultimate personalized experience.
On the other end, users are finally in control of their data and receive a variety of different benefits through the universal shopper profile as well as a crypto for rewarding them receiving ads, performing acts of loyalty, gifting, referral of new users etc.
This is fundamentally different from that competitor, but does not really work with the retailers to onboard users and is trying to reshape consumer behavior to scan barcodes.
Fundamentally very different, Nonetheless we wish them the best of luck. Building start ups is hard, and ones that are blockchain and crypto even more so.
On comparisons to Eligma The retailers will never adopt this and promote it to their shoppers. One of the biggest reasons: cross comparison of pricing and brands.
Brands hate this. They won’t support a product that cross-compares them to each other
I have sat with the presidents of Bloomingdales to the CEO of DuPont and I can give you this as a guarantee. There are major flaws in many of their assumptions.
For instance: that retailers will accept a range of crypto
We had to hack the business model to get around these issues. They also want to replace loyalty points. Not happening - the retailers have spent decades building their programs. We work alongside them with a view to eventually supplant them when we prove it works better.
But we don’t make it the point of the product. Their case study is a company that is crypto centric. Aaaaand it’s owned by a cofounder.
The biggest flaw by far:
With its unique features it will offer users a “one-place”, from where they can shop in all the online stores anywhere in the world, check the value of items in their household and learn the best time to sell them. Eligma will offer users a completely decentralized universal loyalty program and help transform every household into a business.
This is basically Amazon meets Shopify where there is one platform where they cross-sell merchants. More like Open Bazaar.