With the fast evolution of e-commerce across the world since last decade and with the rise of pure players such as Amazon, Alibaba, Flipkart, the physical retail stores growth has witnessed a slow down. To combat with the shrinking market share, the traditional retailers have tried adopting multiple methods to attract the shoppers back to their stores, but none of the methods have proven to be very successful in bringing them back. They still prefer to order and receive items from comfort of their homes, working place through mobile phone apps, website etc.

The challenge faced by traditional stores is that they cannot interact with shoppers directly outside their loyalty programs. As they are unaware about the specific need of shoppers, they are unable to personalize the communication according to the need. To revolutionize this shopping experience and making it feel like a leisure, the brick and mortar stores have to leverage upon direct customized digital communication.

Though shoppers have unmatched experience in a physical outlet where they can feel and touch the things they want to buy as against the online players, but they have a concern that the staff in store is completely unaware of their needs and buying habits. Moreover, the loyalty programs offered by various stores are not integrated to make it a rewarding experience. Lastly, they also have growing concerns over the data privacy after GDPR coming into effect. The lack of fungibility of reward points offered by various stores become a pain point for an average user rather than satisfying their need.

Inspite of all above, the percentage of offline store sales still remain at high mark of 90% and more than 56% of this spending is influenced by digital interactions. More and more focus is being laid on digital marketing through mobile and it is estimated that $70 billion was spent on advertisement through mobile phone in US alone. To collect consumer data, multiple mechanisms have been implemented across stores such as cameras, beacon technology, geofenced advertising, loyalty programs etc. but none of them have been able to engage customers with high success.

Blockchain based protocol or Universal Rewards Protocol can provide an effective and cheaper solution to all these challenges. Under this concept, any brand can opt to join the network to create rewards through smart contract and giving user control of his data. It provides them way to interact directly with the shopper transparently. Shoppers in turn are rewarded with URP tokens, which can be redeemed through personalized offer and promotions. A complete technical architecture on how the solution is framed around blockchain can be checked in the published Whitepaper.

Though few competitors have already entered this space, but the solution from URP is unique and powerful. A comparative chart of advantages of few of companies in this space is listed below:

Image Source: Universal Rewards Protocol Whitepaper

The URP token is a ERC20 compliant token and will be used as an incentive for all stakeholders to behave correctly, preventing fraud and for network security. The implementation of this revolutionary technology will lead to a new era of data driven retail and will help stores in new customer acquisition. The testnet and Alpha release of URP is planned for Q4 2018 and the mainnet will be released by Q2 2019 after the publication of first pilot results. The team plans to sell a total of 240 million URP tokens out of total 600 million URP. Around 33% of tokens will be kept as reserve for adoption of URP by new retailers, brands and for dApps integration on the platform. The crowdsale will be held in September and the token allocation has been planned as follows:

Image Source: Universal Rewards Protocol Whitepaper

Further details on this promising project can be checked at the following links:

Website: https://rewardprotocol.com/

Whitepaper: https://rewardprotocol.com/wp-content/uploads/URP_Whitepaper_VL3.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/UniversalRewardProtocolOfficial

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This article was created in exchange for a potential token reward through Bounty0x, which may be granted on acceptance of this article.

** This should not be treated as explicit financial, trading or otherwise investment advice. Please do your own detailed research before final investing.**