Alex Egorov, CEO BitRewards, t.me/alexbrw

Blockchain offers to hike the efficiency of many different industries. BitRewards cares a lot about small and medium online retailers, and constantly working on the customer development, figuring out their needs and wants. They all are struggling with attraction, conversion, activation, and retention of their users, want a solution and are keen to pay for it.

The statistics show that online merchants are spending annually more than $20 billion on such solutions and often do so extremely inefficiently — over 50% of loyalty programs are closing within the first year after the launch, because they don’t pay off and create more customer frustration, than satisfaction.

The user experiences in loyalty programs leave much to be desired, leading to clients frustration and worsening of their loyalty — quite the opposite to the intention in the first place.

BitRewards is equipping the merchants with the premium set of tools, which will increase their revenue by double-digit figures. And the software, which usually costs thousands of dollars a year will be offered free of charge.

We also don’t plan to impose the limitations on the merchants — they can both issue points or BitRewards internal BIT tokens to reward their users on our system.

E.g., they can choose to reward for shares and likes with points, and for the purchases of the referred friends with the crypto. We aim to give the suite of tools that solve the merchants’ problems better, rather than tie them up to our platform. It will result in broader adoption in the long run.

The merchants want to have a tool that enables them rewarding not only with points, but with something the users deem more valuable — cash, or cryptocurrency (which in certain aspects is better than cash, because it may go up in price (follow our next articles on how it may happen)).

The adoption from the stores presently will, besides the other factors, be driven by the fact that rewarding in crypto helps to stand out among the competition, and in the future, it will become the industry standard and will be demanded by the users.

The one big problem with the blockchain projects in retail is that their founders are putting forth hypothesis how the blockchain will solve customer’s or merchant’s problems with the inexisting products. They are imagining outlandish cases, and claim that the application of blockchain will make them efficient, whereas, to the contrary, blockchain will only complicate the product development.

We follow quite a few projects in the retail niche and see that their assumptions about their product are flawed because it’s against the users’ behavior and absence of customer development procedures.

Importantly, the founders, developing a blockchain project, should be much more aware of the legal consequences, that those of the non-blockchain startups. The question of the ban on crypto often arises. However, in a lot of industries, the outright prohibition of the blockchain currencies will already hardly be possible. We are following the regulators and in reality, approve of the majority of their decisions. They show the desire to shield the public from scam, misconduct, and negligence, rather than uproot the cryptocurrencies as a class. Many state authorities and regulators are actually very supportive of the blockchain technology and cryptocurrency developments. Although, regulators have hard times now figuring out how to approach a lot of concepts and technologies, as the speed of evolution is extraordinary.

Therefore we are most assured that very soon the cryptocurrency will become a standard of the retail industry and will be adopted by almost every store. It’s not hard to figure out how to legitimize the typical retail transactions in crypto, and given that a lot of great minds are applying their skills to this area, it’s a matter short time when we will see it. If you think about it, crypto is much safer and more transparent, than physical paper cash, in which no one objects transacting.