Offer Phase

As stated earlier, in the Offer Phase, a Shop creates (or updates) its Listing within our System.

Besides various contact information and other descriptive information about the Shop, the Listing includes a Points-based Interaction Policy and Discount Policy, as well as a tree of Product Groups available for discount.

Tree of Product Groups

Currently, our System supports a tree of Product Groups, where each Product Group contains a name, description, and photo, as well as references to its parent and child Product Group. Specifying these Product Groups is important, as not only can discounts be customized per Product Group, but also the set of Product Groups can be used as options for Answers to Responses.

In the future, if useful, we may extend the tree into a network, such that each Product Group can also have multiple parents, but for now, that seems unnecessary.

Interaction Policy

In the Interaction Policy, the Shop must specify and configure the set of Interactions on which it places value, as well as the Maximum Point Score awarded for a Customer responding to each Interaction.

Interactions can take the form of the Customer providing data that the Shop finds valuable, the Customer undertaking actions on behalf of the Shop, or any other form of exchange where the Customer provides information that is useful to the Shop.

For each Interaction, the Interaction Policy must specify prompt text, help text, the Answer structure provided in a Response, the Maximum Point Score awared for a Response, and how our System's Scoring Engine should score a Response.

Thought must be given to each Interaction's specified Answer structure, as Responses can take a variety of forms, and the specific form chosen should reflect the nature of the Interaction's prompt. For example, a prompt might ask the Customer to take a picture, write the name, and record the current price for each of the Customer's four (4) favorite products that the Shop sells. For such a response, both the minimum and maximum number of Answers would need to be set to four (4), and the three (3) expected Answer Parts would need to be configured to accept the correct type of information (e.g. photo, text, and number).

Also, thought must be given to how each Interaction should be scored, as our System supports a variety of options for scoring individual Answer Parts included in a Response. These options include 1) accept any Answer (i.e. "Any Answer"), 2) accept only a Correct Answer (i.e. "Correct Answers"), 3) apply a pre-specified set of Scoring Criteria to automatically score the Answer (i.e. "Automatic Scoring"), and 4) allow the Shop to manullay score the Response (i.e. "Manual Scoring").

The "Any Answer" option is useful when metadata included in a Response, such as GPS location, is sufficient to approve the Response or when the Response simply includes selections of prespecified values already existing in our System. The "Correct Answers" option is useful when a the set of acceptable values can be specified deterministically in advance. The "Automatic Scoring" option is useful when the Response includes segements of text which may be analyzed to determine its worth. The "Manual Scoring" option is useful whenever Responses must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis or include hard to judge aspects in the details of the Response.

Publishing the Interaction Policy as part of the Shop's Listing allows Customers to know in advance what requirements will be placed upon them in exchange for discounts at the Shop.

Discount Policy

In the Discount Policy, the Shop must specify the range and types of discounts available at the Overall Shop level and/or at the Product-Group-specific level.

Whether specifying Overall or Product-Group-specific discount ranges, care must be given to determining the Points required for the optimal discount, as well as the Points thresholds for various options as to the nature of the discount. For example, a low Point Score may result in the discount requiring a purchase threshold (e.g. the Customer must spend $X or more) or applying only to a single item.

Publishing the Discount Policy as part of the Shop's Listing allows Customers to determine whether the efforts required to earn discount(s) are worth undertaking or not.