IOU E-COMMERCE OVERVIEW

E-COMMERCE LOYALTY

Finding and acquiring new customers can be a huge challenge. The reasons can be many, but the customer loyalty stats don’t lie: it’s roughly 500% more expensive to convert new ones than to keep current customers.

Fetching a new customer from the clutch of an eminent competitor is like an everlasting headache for marketers5.

When it comes to personalized online experiences in the US, the most popular [factors] were website optimized by the device (desktop, tablet, mobile) (64%) and promotional offers for items the customer is strongly considering (59%)6.

An interesting finding: 53% of adults living in high-income households are willing to switch brands for the sake of using a coupon7. This leads us to a major issue: the challenges that e-commerce faces.

E-COMMERCE CHALLENGES

In the era of internet, e-commerce is the king. However, this exponentially growing market faces some serious challenges:

1. CUSTOMER LOYALTY

It is a key issue as it takes lots of efforts for companies to make a new customer and maintain the same customer for long time.

One of the reasons why ecommerce companies face the struggle while building trust and loyalty with customer, is because a seller and a buyer don’t know each other, nor they can see each other while making a transaction unlike street-shopping. It takes few transactions, time and plenty of efforts by the company to build the customer trust and loyalty8.

2. ACHIEVING PROFITABLE LONG-TERM GROWTH

Increasing sales is one way to grow the business but in the end, what matters most is profitability. Online retailers must always find ways to cut inventory costs, improve marketing efficiency, reduce overhead, reduce shipping costs, and control order returns.

3. CHOOSING THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY & PARTNERS

Some online retailers may face growth challenges because their technology is limiting them, or they’ve hired the wrong partners/agencies to help them manage their projects. Retailers wanting to achieve growth must build on a good technology foundation. They must choose the right shopping cart solution, inventory management software, email software, CRM systems, analytics and so much more. In addition, hiring the wrong partners or agencies to help them implement projects may also limit their growth. Online retailers must choose carefully who to work with.

E-COMMERCE MARKET: A GIANT

The e-commerce market is a global giant. For private consumers around the globe, the most well-known form of e-commerce falls into the business to consumer (B2C) category, which includes online retail or online shopping. In 2017, an estimated 1.66 billion people worldwide purchased goods online. During the same year, global e-retail sales amounted to 2.3 trillion U.S. dollars and projections show a growth of up to 4.48 trillion U.S. dollars by 2021. In Asia Pacific, e-retail sales accounted for 12.1 percent of retail sales in 2016 compared to 8.1 percent in North America, and only for 1.8 percent of retail sales in the Middle East and Africa.

HOW IT WORKS

IOU offers complete transparency utilizing Blockchain for its Group Loyalty offers with clear visibility, security, speed of processing and traceability of transactions through the decentralized register of all sources.

IOU is Offering Merchants and Consumers clear advantages over the traditional e-commerce environment making transactions Cost-Effective and Secure while building ultimate trust between Merchants and Consumers. Rating mechanism would boost a trust even further.

Cost-effectiveness of transactions and global reach of consumers beat the conventional digital payment methods as it removes the middlemen/payment processors that take a big cut.

Not only consumers would feel secure and get significant savings but also, they could use their purchased IOUs as actual monetary assets which they will be able to trade with other consumers or sell on the exchange. This is a tremendous benefit of IOU Platform.

Loyalty factor is another huge benefit allowing both consumers and merchants to get rewarded for generating top rated, quality offers and transactions on IOU Exchange. Merchants and Consumers will be able to donate some IOUs for those in need and get rewarded for philanthropic activities. The company would also place donation requests on special causes and would reward Merchants and Consumers, as well as match such donations to benefit those causes.

I. FOR MERCHANTS

• IOU-Co Issuance

• Online Store displaying various Merchant IOUs on range of categories

• Mobile and browser integration for transfers of IOU offers

• Marketing Campaign module allowing multi-media and social networking integration

• Consumer Data analysis such as GPS and Buying Trends

• Various permissions and roles based on Merchant status to reach consumers

• Analytic Reports on sales and consumer interaction

• Web Services with home grown or 3rd party applications

• Rating Tools

• Merchant would also have an option to Guarantee the Service and issue refunds of payments

• P2P Exchange of IOU offers between Merchants and Consumers as well as among other Merchants