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BCF Funding Proposal Request Template

Project Name: Merchant Savings Calculator

FPR Id: 0059

Start Date: 27/05/2018

Hashtag: #savecash #savefees

Name of BCF Gitter community room: #proj-merchantSavingsCalculator

Stakeholders: Core stakeholders: http://rohanthompson.com/ - project lead & AR/XR developer https://zhavier.com/ – developer from Discord group with 5+ years C#, unity and development experience

Community & advice: http://siosism.com/ – external insight / retail partner https://www.linkedin.com/in/aronbutcher/ - external insight / retail partner – Director of digital for Major Australian mall group, incentivized to help retail (their clients), has lots of retailers can connect with

Project Summary: This project is to build a "Merchant Savings Calculator" – that is, a website that helps achieve the BCF fund goal of 1billion people using BCH within 5 years by accelerating merchant adoption by providing a free merchant savings calculator service which allows merchants to:

  1. quickly and easily calculate and visualize merchant fees payable to various providers on their current sales;
  2. instantly determine which of all merchant solutions has the lowest fees and how much the merchant/user would save by switching to the lowest cost solution (currently BCH); and
  3. click through to the lowest cost solutions so that they can benefit from lower TX fees (and spread BCH).

We are submitting this project because it received the highest number of votes of the 9 optional services listed in the recent BCH survey and because the majority of participants believed winning merchants is the key target market for the next 12 months. For survey results see https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1RiL65PhtUi1RBAb1WolyxWl4UQPq6c6U0i7AJnW3OMA/edit?usp=sharing.

For a static mockup demo of this service, see http://fee-saver.webflow.io/ The final version would include all major providers such that anyone around the world could very quickly and easily calculate how much money they could save from switching to the lowest cost provider (which given the options after may will be BCH) and get an instant link to the lowest cost provider. Also, as the system is realtime - if you change values, the system almost instantly updates. The key is to create a free service that spreads merchant adoption by highlighting the key benefit – savings / lower costs and thus more profit to merchants and to do so in a way that's visual, concrete and unbiased, letting the truth shine through.

Resources: Domain – depends on resources: could use domains I've paid for/purchased including: moneysight.com (64% of survey votes), armony.com (17%), or buy a better name: eg. save.cash for $644 (see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BDMJ1cz-5Lxrs8kkLQ5LNpoQKYyh5xNr5PjxOxoLPLw/edit#gid=0 )

Data – 1) list of online payment solutions the calculator will handle and their prices per sale (some have base rates, others scale), 2) key BCH pos systems and other services (for eg would be nice to get the 'info pack to help businesses adopt BCH" from BCF + list of other services).

Developers – to code up the calculator

Services

  1. email subscriber list (will use free one like survey monkey) to build the list of people who want to get updates on edits/additions)
  2. fee monitoring system – need way to keep up to date with the fees of all payment systems in the calculator. For meantime will setup email that subscribes to services + google alerts + webform on site "any improvement ideas for the calc?, contact us')
  3. submissions / improvements / contact form (ongoing management required)

Connections

  1. to retailers, to test the website on them and see if they: 1) fill out and use the calc without any prompting (interface test), 2) take action / click through to POS or other BCH services and take action
  2. to broader BCH community for translation of site / distribution globally – especially in target markets like Africa and India

Budget: After donating weeks of my time to research, preparation of how to best help the community, and building out this concept and design, here is my breakdown of what it'd cost to bring this service to the world.

Amount Description 1000 Research & data collection of all pos systems & pricing to power calculator (must ensure all major payment systems – traditional (western union), ecommerce (paypal / stripe) and blockchain (centbee) merchant providers are included to reduce bias and increase trust in site) 5000 Development of real-time interactive 3D calculator displaying bar chart + 3d viz of stacks of cash (in top 5 traded fiats USD, Euro, pound, yuan, AUD) below payment system logo (Stripe, Alipay, etc) operational in WebGL + savings from adopting lowest cost payment system (i.e. BCH & Centbee) 1000 gaining feedback from retailers & updates to website & application ongoing management (free - i'll donate time + hopefully we get donations from the community) 7000 Total cost to produce

Timeline:

  1. find team – done
  2. mockup website, basics done - see http://fee-saver.webflow.io/ (what's missing is the calculator itself - which won't be web form as in demo site but a WebGL box that has a real-time aspect - instantiates stacks of cash under each payment system logo (i.e. PayPal, Stripe, BCH etc)
  3. by 15 May – collect data for all payment systems related information (pricing/transaction fees, distributers, etc), brand logos (for app) + choose domain
  4. by 15 Jun – build alpha in Unity and deploy to WebGL - embed in site
  5. by 30 Jun – test alpha on retailers
  6. by 15 July – make improvements, deploy beta release to WebGL and embed on site
  7. by 15 July – announce beta, share through channels
  8. after 15 July – seek community and other partners to release versions in different languages to cover as much of the globe as possible + incorporate other payment systmes + update list of BCH partners whom the site can refer to
  9. ongoing maintenance of application (need to ensure pricing is up to date)

Goals: Key goal is to speed up merchant adoption of BCH:

  1. by July 2018, this project is the pre-eminent choice / shared resource / tool shared by merchants and POS systems when deciding what payment system to use or helping other merchants to decide what payment systems they should adopt
  2. by Sep 2018, this project has had major news coverage by the largest merchant groups / associations in Africa, India, UK, USA and Australia – so that merchants across the globe have an increased chance of discovering this project
  3. by Dec 2018, this project has the largest database of BCH merchants globally and has become a resource for people traveling wanting to know who accepts BCH (see globe concept below + would also have search option)
  4. by Dec 2018 this project is a major referral source for BCH merchant services (Centbee, etc) enabling retailers/brands to transact with less cost than the competition (i.e. Stripe, Alipay, etc)

Other: Instead of traditional calculators which vizualise outputs in numbers or bar charts (boring), this calculator is different in that it'll show you stacks of cash before you. We'll use WebGL because we need that to animate the bar charts / vizualise the fees. Using visuals is less abstract and thus easier for merchants to understand and act upon. For examples of what you can do building to webGL, see https://experiments.withgoogle.com/chrome?tag=WebGL

We can build to the web with WebGL today, and load the calculator into people's worlds - on their coffee tables, etc within 1-2 years. For eg. I spoke with Firefox and it seems most devices will be able to leverage AR via websites within 1-2 years. This means that all work done here to build this 3D calculator will be usable in AR soon – i.e. see video background on my site – https://www.augx.com/ This means this project will be the first augmented reality merchant fee calculator – which should give us more PR.

Since we'll be collecting a list of all the merchant solutions + merchants, once launched, if we get enough donations I'd love to build a 3D global map of the world so that users / consumers know how to save cash by shopping with BCH merchants – i.e. imagine this but each dot is a provider/merchant/retail store and you can see who the brand is. For eg see – http://radio.garden/live/

Have already started reaching out to BCH services like https://www.centbee.com/ to get merchant pricing information for the calculator.

Finally, if you have any ideas, suggestions or advice for this concept or how to make it successful in scaling BCH, please let me know! Thanks Rohan