We are working on a new entertainment shopping platform due out later this year. In short it will be an online retail and auction services company that will serve customers across the United States with deals on consumer electronics, appliances, outdoor gear, mining equipment, precious metals and gift cards. We’ll sell wholesale products through a conventional ecommerce platform and an online auction platform. Our auction platform will be a bidding fee platform where users wanting to participate in the auctions need to buy bids to play (pay-to-play). Very similar to some “penny auction” sites.
I, personally, have not spent much time with Counterparty but from briefly reading and researching I am curious if I can use its asset feature for the betterment of our future customers. I’ve followed Colored coins and Mastercoin for a while hoping I could actually do what I think I can do. I’ll explain:
On the auction side of our site we’ll be selling bids (Plays) in packs (Play Packs) for customers who want to bid on product auctions. We’ll also give away bids as rewards. (We are developing tons of gaming mechanics features into the shopping experience, hence “entertainment”). These free bids are going to be called Tokens. So we’ll have 2 types of bids for the auction customers to use: Plays (paid bids) and Tokens (free bids). Make sense?
I’m wondering if our Plays or even Tokens could be assets created by Counterparty. They would have an inherent initial value ie: $0.55, and only be bought on our site in Play Packs. After they are bought customers can use them to win products at big discounts. But my question is what if they could also take them off the site and use them elsewhere? There is a revenue benefit for us to be the only source for the bids to be created and distributed via Play Packs (or given away as Tokens), but is there a benefit to allow customers to take them off the site, possibly use them somewhere else or trade them? Perhaps a secondary market for Plays and Tokens. There may not be a revenue benefit for us with a secondary market, but our customers may find benefit in it and help retain return customers, which every business wants. So if they are Counterparty assets they could be smarter than just dumb bids we create and are only good on our site.
I’m curious what anyone has to say about this. I’m also curious, if people like the idea, is someone savvy enough to help create these assets for us. This is a sidebar project to our focus the next few months of getting the store up and running.
i think it depends on what u do with it.
I think it would be great since there is infrastructure you can re-use and it works very well for any point or tokensystems.
The only thing you have to make sure is that you don’t rely on speed?
It takes 10 min to do anything with this these coins so on your site you probably want to use some sort of a copy so you can transact quickly.
But if you figure out the interface i think it would be great. You can offer ur customers to then sell or buy the token outside your system.
You could even sell them yourself on the marketplace here and make sure there is always liquidity available.
[quote author=Adeally link=topic=242.msg1877#msg1877 date=1397242738]
I’m curious what anyone has to say about this. I’m also curious, if people like the idea, is someone savvy enough to help create these assets for us. This is a sidebar project to our focus the next few months of getting the store up and running.
[/quote]
If there is demand on the secondary market for the tokens, it would be very attractive for customers. Regarding the revenue benefit for the ‘Plays’ tokens you would have already received revenue for those tokens so what the user decides to do after that is something you wouldn’t need to worry about. If the user wanted to trade ‘Plays’ for XCP then the increased exposure of your tokens would be of benefit to you.
Has anyone contacted you regarding implementation of the tokens? If not, you send me a PM. I’d be happy to help!
[quote author=knircky link=topic=242.msg1904#msg1904 date=1397451487]
The only thing you have to make sure is that you don’t rely on speed?
It takes 10 min to do anything with this these coins so on your site you probably want to use some sort of a copy so you can transact quickly.
[/quote]
The tokens within the shop website can remain off blockchain (like exchanges) so transactions will be close to instantaneous. If a customer wants to receive the tokens to their wallet then they will have to wait for a block.
[quote author=Global_trade_repo link=topic=242.msg1906#msg1906 date=1397456708]
Has anyone contacted you regarding implementation of the tokens? If not, you send me a PM. I’d be happy to help!
[/quote]
PM sent.