Seeking feedback on my business model?

I’m working on a business model for a new online venture of mine.

I need to attract general consumers to the site and get them to perform a required action like voting in a poll.

They accrue points for completing the required action, but I don’t really have anything that general consumers can spend the points on.

Does anyone have any experience or ideas as to how I can convert the “points” into tangible goods. Does anyone know of a service that I could leverage easily to allow people to purchase stuff using their points?

 

A "service"? No, I don't know of one.

Content management systems like Drupal can be configured to award users points and then allow those points to be spent during checkout on items (drupal + ecommerce module + userpoints module). I'm about to implement this in an online bookstore I'm working on.

I don't know anything about any non-Drupal CMS, but I'd be very surprised if you couldn't do the same in Mambo or Joomla.

For products you might want to see whether you have local trade shows geared toward mail-order catalog companies. We have a good one in my area that goes on one weekend every other month and you should be able to find something of that nature in any major city -- provided you're looking for made-in-China-type goods that can be had cheaply.

Grab a few mail-order gift catalogs, that should give you some ideas.

It sounds like you have a solid strategy for getting $$$ to flow away from the site, so hopefully you have a good plan to get it to flow toward the site even faster.

 

Let them trade their points for amazon gift certificates, you would have to do the transfer manually though.

Even the incentive site scripts generally make you do the transfer manually.

 

Thanks for that, I certainly do have a way to money flowing in

The Amazon gif voucer is not a bad idea.

I have come across e-Gold. I though maybe I could convert the points to e-Gold and the users can spend it as they see fit at any participating merchant or cash it out using a gold exchange.

Any comment on that approach? any advantage over just paying people using paypal.

I also though of having a sweepstake type prize, every point you earn enters you into the competition. The more moints the hight the chance you have of winning. I'll give away prizes as such.

 

E-gold is a bad way to pay people for this setup (unless your market is kids and people from countries that paypal won't touch).

Very few merchants accept e-gold and no one wants to go through the hassle of using a gold exchange.

 

Thanks tke71709 for that, do you think then that paying people via paypal is feasible?

There are many sites around where you earn points in return for contributing the site build its community or attract advertisers. I am thinking of "pay to do surveys" etc..

Doe's anyone know what the preferred compensation method is for the users of these sites?

 

Fraud is going to be your biggest factor. It's always the case in incentive programs. The challenge of course will be as fraud increases as you achieve a new user base, potential advertisers will be overly concerned with that. if you can get past the first threshold of fraud, you should be fine.

 

You just don't pay out the user until the company releases the payment to you.

You'll want to put other measures in place as well to avoid people having two accounts, etc... but most decent scripts will have this built in.

 

Well, that's normally the assumption but fact is, a chargeback can happen for up to 18 months later.

 

That's just part of the cost of doing business, so you need to factor that into your payment schedule.

If someone is really concerned about that, they can restrict their offers to free offers and their is no chance of a chargeback occurring.