Merchant Marketing Pitch

[bytemaster]

Near-instant payment confirmations

Confirm payments in seconds, with zero chargebacks.

(Although credit cards can be near-instant as well, they do not eliminate chargebacks. It may be worth reiterating the point that BitUSD can be near-instant to help preempt skepticism and also to distinguish BitUSD from Bitcoin and slower solutions.)


[bReduce liability[/b]

Increase customer confidence-your customers no longer need to worry about data breaches or identity theft


Eliminate minimum credit card purchase amounts

No need to set a minimum transaction size to cover credit card fees. Give your customers maximum flexibility.

There is a fine line between pitching features vs benefits.   "Near-instant payment confirmations" is a feature, not a benefit.   What is the benefit of having near-instant payment confirmations? 

[pendragon3]

Near-instant payment confirmations

Confirm payments in seconds, with zero chargebacks.

(Although credit cards can be near-instant as well, they do not eliminate chargebacks. It may be worth reiterating the point that BitUSD can be near-instant to help preempt skepticism and also to distinguish BitUSD from Bitcoin and slower solutions.)


[bReduce liability[/b]

Increase customer confidence-your customers no longer need to worry about data breaches or identity theft


Eliminate minimum credit card purchase amounts

No need to set a minimum transaction size to cover credit card fees. Give your customers maximum flexibility.

[sumantso]

If there was a way to accept BitUSD/AU without the eftpos facilities that cost an arm and a leg we would set it up in a pinch.

!! I think we have a new Delegate brewing here.

Step 1: Gather with some talented, motivated friends and write up a proposal for a Delegate outlining how you will set up bitUSD/AU.
Step 2: If you need start capital, promise away some % of your future Delegate salary, or ask for donations or a grant from I3.
Step 3: Set up your business and accept bitUSD with your bitUSD/AU service.
Step 4: ? ? ?
Step 5: Profit!

Extra step: Figure out how to produce blocks, or go out of your skill set to try and find somebody who can.

The reason why I think delegates and employees should be kept separate.

[pendragon3]

Increase Profits

At just $0.02 per transaction you can increase your profit margins by several percent by eliminating credit card fees.

"Increasing profit margins by several percent" is vague. Surely it depends on the type of business?

How much on average do merchants pay in CC fees? Does it differ for small, medium, and large merchants? Some hard figures to cite to would be useful.

Also, it might be more accurate to talk about percentage point increases rather than percentage increases. Better yet, talk about eliminating 2.x% in fees from every sale.

[Pheonike]

That may hurt a little, but it gives bitusd utility reach will increase volume. As long the ppl spending bitusd keep some some in their account it will increase the value of bts. Convincing ppl spenders to keep bitusd in their accounts is important. And they will only do that if they know there are merchants that will accept it.

[milkmeat]

I think you will need on/off ramps available before you can sell this. Merchants will need to be able to convert to fiat. Mainly to pay wages, taxes, and for some, piece of mind in this new unproven frontier.

This is very important. How do we address that? If converting bitUSD to FIAT is more expensive than credit card fee, bitUSD is not attracting any more. Merchants needs fiat to pay wages and dividends anyway, at least before bitUSD is well accepted, this is a very long time.

[Rune]

BitUSD is a currency. They don't need to hold it. All we care about is that they are not accepting BTS (an asset we hope to accumulate value) and immediately selling it.

The effect of a merchant accepting and dumping bitUSD is exactly the same as accepting and dumping BTS: it hurts our market cap. Now obviously getting merchants on board will not make the BTS market cap decrease, since hodlers will buy back after spending. But it will not increase our market cap either, beyond the wow factor. As we saw with bitcoin the wow factor is not very significant. People assumed that bitcoin would go to the moon once PayPal started supporting it, but that barely registered on the price. The fact is that for the vast majority of people it is simply too convenient to just continue using their cards to pay for stuff (the obvious exception being the drug markets).

Anyway, once again I'm not arguing against enabling merchant integration. Getting merchants on board is good. But it's important that people realize that it will have almost no effect on the price, and should be considered simply as something that makes it more convenient for us who already hold to spend our BTS and bitUSD.

[lovejoy]

Excellent pitch BM!

Everyone is getting excited just by seeing how everything comes together, and that fuels into energy for coming up with suggestions. Keep posting things like this regularly and our precious market cap will keep rising, even before the push

Great suggestions from bits in particular! Taking all the metaphors inherent in our language and tasting, smelling, feeling them out before letting them into the wild to attract people.

In summary, people like to Gain, Take, Increase, and be part of the future, or at least not part of the past
more than have, be, eliminate, and reduce

Thanks.  Language is so important.

‘A man was drowning in the lake near a little village. Many people around tried to reach out their hands in order to save him, shouting “Give me your hand! Give me your hand!…” But he didn’t hear them, he just continued to flounder and to drown.

A Wiseman, who was walking through the village, came near to the lake and asked “Who’s that man?” Someone answered “He’s the most stingy man in our village!” The Wiseman went near the water, stretched out his arm and told him “Take my hand!” Immediately the stingy one grabbed the Wiseman’s hand and saved himself.’

From traditional Sufi tales

 

[House]

If there was a way to accept BitUSD/AU without the eftpos facilities that cost an arm and a leg we would set it up in a pinch.

!! I think we have a new Delegate brewing here.

Step 1: Gather with some talented, motivated friends and write up a proposal for a Delegate outlining how you will set up bitUSD/AU.
Step 2: If you need start capital, promise away some % of your future Delegate salary, or ask for donations or a grant from I3.
Step 3: Set up your business and accept bitUSD with your bitUSD/AU service.
Step 4: ? ? ?
Step 5: Profit!

Sounds great CLains. Not sure if that is aimed at me as I am not as smart as you fellas and wouldn't know where to begin. I have all the motivation in the world to bolster BTS and I promote it to friends and colleagues everyday. I would also love to be a delegate but I don't want to be a rusty ol' cog in our pristine time piece.
Sure don't want to be asking for grants or start up capital from our community. I'm happy to contribute to our platform going forward, just don't have the smarts to implement a solution for bitUSD/AU payment gateway,

[CLains]

If there was a way to accept BitUSD/AU without the eftpos facilities that cost an arm and a leg we would set it up in a pinch.

!! I think we have a new Delegate brewing here.

Step 1: Gather with some talented, motivated friends and write up a proposal for a Delegate outlining how you will set up bitUSD/AU.
Step 2: If you need start capital, promise away some % of your future Delegate salary, or ask for donations or a grant from I3.
Step 3: Set up your business and accept bitUSD with your bitUSD/AU service.
Step 4: ? ? ?
Step 5: Profit!

[CLains]

Another thing,

While many of us are tempted to promote BTS with a high % yeild or a referral program, this is probably not the crucial selling point for merchants. Professionalism, speed, reliability, efficiency and simplicity I would assume is what merchants want. They just want to focus on selling their beloved products without having to worry about all that jazz.

I agree with Rune that when we are pitching BTS as a bank or personal vault it is at least worth looking very seriously into the idea of fixing a high yield, but I agree with Ander and Clout here that Rune's analogy to BTC regarding sell-pressure from merchants fails in the case of bitUSD: at least bitUSD demands collateral.

But we need to be careful here. If total supply of bitUSD is shrinking, then it seems to me there will likely be BTS sell pressure. At least it would matter a lot if we prevent merchants going out of bitUSD right away, and rather have them hold on to it a while, say 30 days ..

Think velocity: If we double the average holding time from buy (USD-->bitUSD) to sell (bitUSD -> USD), we double the minimum market cap of bitUSD as well. In the limit, if bitUSD was used the very trillionth of a second it was bought and sold into USD, then we would only need 1 bitUSD market cap to do a trillion bitUSD worth of transactions per second.

?? Am I thinking straight

[House]

Can I just add that my wife and I are about to open a retail store, (looking at franchise) and I would just love to be able to accept something like Bitusd. Even though we are here in Australia it is still applicable. Shame it is labeled USD.
If there was a way to accept BitUSD/AU without the eftpos facilities that cost an arm and a leg we would set it up in a pinch.

[CLains]

Excellent pitch BM!

Everyone is getting excited just by seeing how everything comes together, and that fuels into energy for coming up with suggestions. Keep posting things like this regularly and our precious market cap will keep rising, even before the push

Great suggestions from bits in particular! Taking all the metaphors inherent in our language and tasting, smelling, feeling them out before letting them into the wild to attract people.

In summary, people like to Gain, Take, Increase, and be part of the future, or at least not part of the past
more than have, be, eliminate, and reduce

[liondani]

From the time the customer makes a payment you start earning the best interest the market can offer on your funds.

As it is stated I don't see any difference with traditional banks. I hear the same thing from them... But the best they "can" give is for example 0.5% interest...
How can we convince them that the best we can give has nothing to do compared with the best we "can" give they are talking about?...

We must make a more powerful statement maybe based on real facts. For example:

Our merchants already earned an average of 7%* interest the last one year.What about you?

*the interest rates change dynamically depended on the market forces

[betax]

I am loving the new pitch for Merchants, and pitching for benefits. What problem are we solving for each type of user? Once you start focusing in each demography you realise that with little extra effort (ie creating a demo web cart) how many users you can attract. Find a benefit for the customer and pitch it, look at https://thegrid.io/ just pitching to solve the design pain of each website.

Bitshares is a Bank and a Exchange, Banks need merchants, merchants need banks.

A huge extra benefit (and simple feature to add) would be Auto conversion from Currencies, charge in bitCNY (Eur,GBP) and auto convert to bitUSD. Be able to query the blockchain to get the latest rate.