With Universal Reward Protocol it will be possible for shoppers to get rewarded by retailers simply by visiting a store. The shoppers need only to share their shopping data to be able to get tokens and retailers show them offers that suit their needs.
For physical retail it is increasingly difficult to get customers and online shops are becoming more and more dominant. It is more convenient to visit a website to buy products and recommender systems in online shops are very accurate and they show users what they are looking for and what they might like to buy. But some things like clothes are hard to buy online because it is difficult to find the exact size and this is an important point where physical retail stores have an advantage.
With Universal Reward Protocol retailers can reward shoppers for any type of shopping behavior. This is an opportunity for retailers to strengthen the relationship to the customers. The shoppers have only to share their shopping behavior data with the retailers to get URP tokens and the retailers can make offers that best suit the customer’s needs. This makes it easier for the retailers to get information about the customers that sometimes is hard to get and shoppers have the advantage to get personalized offers like in online shops. This platform will be implemented on a blockchain which is best suited because it is decentralized and no intermediaries are needed. In this way interactions are done directly between retailers and shoppers. Retailers and brands will have a Campaign Manager where they have the Reward Campaign Manager to define campaigns and the Redemption Campaign Manager where retailers can create personalized offers. On the other side the shoppers will have the Profile Manager. It has 3 main components:
- A campaign search component, to inform shoppers in real time what behaviors can be rewarded and what offers can be redeemed
- A wallet component, where users can see the balance of the URP tokens which they have collected
- A privacy manager component, lets shoppers decide which type of data they share, which retailer they share it with, and when they share it.
To get data about users plug and play IoT sensors collect signals emitted by smartphones.
The URP token will be a ERC20 utility token. The token will be used by retailers to distribute to shoppers based on rules they choose. Shoppers can use then the tokens for discounts, gifts or premium services. The URP tokens are redeemable through across all retailers in the network.
This project started out of a research project at UC Berkeley and Ecole Polytechnique in 2015 and in 2016 a proof of concept was made. In Q3 of this year the token sale will be done. In Q4 an alpha version of URP will be released, then in Q2 of 2019 the mainnet will be released.
The token sale has a soft cap of 5 million dollars and a hard cap of 20 million dollars. The supply is fixed to 600 million and the price of one toke will be 0.1 dollar. 40% of the tokens will be available during the toke sale. Unsold tokens will be reallocated to all buyers who participated in the token sale proportionally to their initial stake.