Thanks for your continued interest in Waivio!
Our initial venture into open business models on Waivio was a project called Dining.Gifts, which provided restaurant rebates. This project was primarily focused on the Vancouver, BC, Canada region, and the majority of our sales efforts were concentrated there. However, like many others, we found that persuading people to trust crypto and master self-custody of keys was no easy task. Rewards as high as $10.00 for sharing two photos of a restaurant dish weren't enough, despite having hundreds of participating restaurants.
About a year ago, we decided to explore another open business model: Social.Gifts with a focus on social shopping. This model uses the public Hive blockchain to store information about products and product reviews, essentially serving as a decentralized version of Amazon.
In the simplest scenario, users can browse products, "heart" them (akin to liking), and create a shopping list that transforms into an actual affiliate shop on the user's profile. Our plan is to allow users to add their affiliate codes in their settings, so that all product links in their profiles and posts will automatically include these codes. This gives users the opportunity to earn affiliate commissions for product referrals.
Users can elevate their shops by creating social shopping websites. Below are a few early projects for reference:
Clean Girl Aesthetics - https://cleangirl.social.gifts
Camping Checklist - https://camping.social.gifts
Launching these affiliate shops on a public chain offers an unexpected advantage: other users can effortlessly replicate these projects. In the Web 2.0 world, this is completely unacceptable. However, in the Web 3.0 ecosystem, projects can achieve economies of scale together because they share user database, product knowledge base, reviews, and all connections. This interconnectedness means that instead of isolated silos that compete, each project's success on Hive contributes to the collective success.
May be because you focused your sales efforts at places where $10.00 was not enough, how about developing countries, like APAC and other places, where it really would matter ?
Social.Gifts sounds like a good idea, is it live ? I would be interested especially on reviews as most reviews on actual sites are fake. It would be great, if a review system exists with honest opinions about the product, with a link to the product.
Re: Dining.Gifts
The value of rebates usually represents about 25% of a typical restaurant bill. In markets where the average bill is lower, the reward for sharing two photos of a dish will be proportionally less.
Re: Social.Gifts
The primary focus of Social.Gifts is affiliate commissions. It offers a easy way to monetize your interests and hobbies: create a product collection that transforms into a sleek, mobile-friendly website, like the ones previously mentioned. Yes, the service is fully operational, though we are still finalizing the tutorials.
Re: rewards for product reviews
Yes, rewards are already available for reviewing certain products. You can find them in the Earn / Global section on Waivio.com.