In-Store Currency (Shopify)

Unify the use of in-store currency that can be issued by the store and/or transferred by the customer to be redeemed through checkout.

Software and UX team of 4 - operate a Shopify discount app and Cardano stake pool. Worked in ecommerce for large brand names.

Initial Scope

1. A website/app that allows businesses to setup their currency and establish rules for issuance and redemption. We'll use Shopify as an initial eco-system to build in but the APIs and interface can be standalone to further expand into other markets later.

2. Server code to dynamically create smart contracts/tokens for the in-store currency.

3. A Shopify integration to allow redemption of the in-store currency. This will require a new storefront app to be able to redeem tokens (giving them back to the store owner). Many more integrations can be done and an API/abstraction could be useful to further expand this. Initially, the redemption is in exchange for a discount on products.

4. Wallets:

• (For general public): An easy way (crypto not even mentioned) to see and spend their store credit
• (For crypto enthusiasts): A wallet to hold the native tokens - this will involve looking at Yoroi/AdaLite and/or possibly our own interface as a universal wallet for customers so the shop owners can market to these communities

Our Team

We are a team of 4 with software engineering and user experience design skills. Our expertise spans cloud infrastructure and dev ops (CI/CD, terraform etc), software (JavaScript (React, NextJS, NodeJS), Rust, Java & experience with functional programming). We've worked for major brands (such as Sony, HSBC, Nationwide, Pizza Hut) and consultancies (ex McKinsey).

Our Experience

We currently operate a successful discounting app in Shopify (https://apps.shopify.com/stackable-discounts) where we wrote a discounting engine in Rust to be able to stack multiple discounts together. We have over 300 stores after 2 months of operation.

We've also been operating a Cardano stake pool since the ITN (ZONE) and are largely based in London (1 of us in the US)

Benefits

To shoppers

• Only need one wallet to acquire currency from many shops
• Can easily transfer to one another, opening up a new realm of possibility for in-store currency use cases

To shops

• No need to implement a centralised points scheme
• Can manage issuance for store credit, points, gift cards all with the same system
• Benefit from the security that Cardano offers
• Can acquire new customers from those who have been recipients of transferred tokens
• Access to a new and upcoming crypto-friendly markets

Long term Vision

After this phase, we would look to further funding rounds to build upon this to start integrating with popular 3rd parties and help existing Loyalty software make use of this new in-store currency. Marketing apps and discounting apps could also benefit from the integrations. These can be explored over time as we start to see adoption from the initial phase.

Looking out from this, we can imagine the future where people can send each other points redeemable for coffee, food and all types of products. Store owners around the world could tokenise access to their products which can be transferred and swapped between people. Parents could send their student kids supermarket tokens to be spent on food. The in-store value system becomes much more far reaching, simplifies the customer experience, reduces impact on the environment saves huge amounts of money collectively as the burden of custom centralised systems are reduced.

Expectations

Initially this is most likely to propagate amongst the crypto enthusiastic merchants. We only see adoption really happening if we can do something that is currently impossible in this space. This is why the transfer of tokens is an important experiment to build upon. We want the benefit of consolidation to drive initial adoption but ultimately the shift in capability to transferrable value between shoppers to drive mass adoption across all merchant types (retail, online etc).

Project Time & Costs

We are costing for 6 months development and delivery for 3/4 people. Operational costs will then be supported through merchant charges for the use of the app through the Shopify eco-system.

Metrics

We will be able to directly measure the stores who adopt the app and also the number of customers of those stores using the in-store currencies. This would be transparently reported to the community.