LOCALPUZZLE.COM: Supporting independent businesses, rewarding shoppers’ loyalty and revitalising the high street

• THE IDEA

  PRODUCTS & SERVICES

  LocalPuzzle.com combines gamification with social selling and captures this in a smart points based spending incentive. Our system compels our users (‘shoppers’) to discover and spend up to 3 times more than average with independent businesses.
  Our shoppers spend with any independent business in the UK to collect ‘puzzle points’. These points climb them up a leader-board, and then every 2 months, those with the most points win a share of thousands of pounds, which in turn fuels more spending.
  Our shoppers have already spent £1,000,000 with our independents merchants, 21% of that has been spent with merchants that pay us a commission. This is 1 of 3 natural and active revenue streams.

  PROBLEM SOLVED

  £80bn is spent annually with independent merchants in the UK, there are however 3 pain points:
  1) Independents face an overwhelming competition from eCommerce, chains with big marketing budgets and sophisticated loyalty programmes.
  2) Shoppers would love to spend with independent merchants, but are lured in by the one-stop-shop comfort, easy parking and reward programmes of the big chains and mega-stores.
  3) All those lovely independent retailers and merchants which add colour to our high street are slowly disappearing. They are replaced by the usual suspects of; non-descript, bland, chains, which offer exactly the same experience in every town.
  LocalPuzzle solves these problems.

  REVENUE MODEL

  1) Premium merchants pay us a commission in return for increased spending by our shoppers
  2) Business to business advertising – we share revenue from this with our retailers to motivate them to buy from our advertisers (we predict that big brands will enjoy the convenience of selling to independents on-mass through LocalPuzzle B2B)
  3) In App Payments – we have both free and premium activities that our shoppers already enjoy.

  Further revenue streams are in the pipeline including Big Data opportunities.

  EXIT STRATEGY

  Our exit strategy is to sell to private equity in 3.5 years.

  We will remain vigilant for other exciting exits, for example, Groupon turned down an offer from Google in 2011 for $5bn. The LocalPuzzle model is financially superior for it’s clients as it focuses on driving tangible and transparent profits to them. It achieves this through adopting a proprietary ‘differential fee’ technology that automatically charges one commission for clients existing customers and another for new customers. In addition to this, LocalPuzzle has also developed a spending algorithm that increases average spends / basket values by up to 3 times.

Source: icnw