Are there any good Virgin Mobile deals on minutes?

What do you think about my business idea that offers on premise deals and offers?

• onSPOT – On Premise Deals and Offers Platform Idea: An on premise deals and offers platform where we install a touch screen kiosk at the user premise – a retail outlet like a restaurant, saloon and spa or similar. The users login to the kiosk or on their mobile and play a slot game or similar and get awarded deals as their win. The deals are created and managed by the store owner in the backend admin. Retail outlets (Restaurants, spas, saloons, stores) would be referred to as stores in the document.                                                 Benefits to the user: Ø Win exciting deals – upto 100% off on meals - not available online or anywhere else except on premise Ø Excitement of winning a deal exclusive to the user Ø The kiosk can feature winners on the main screen – being a featured winner. Ø Find flash deals available for a few hours / days of time Why would users register / play: Ø Get deals which are generally not announced to masses Ø Play and win – instead of just getting a deal available over the internet Ø Get access to flash deals announced by stores to its customer or onSPOT users only. Benefits to Store Owners: Ø Retail outlets, especially restaurants do not know their customers. Most advertising in Newspapers, online or by any other medium is non targeted, costly and probably not so effective as well. Ø The onSPOT platform will give the stores access to the user’s profiles which will build up slowly and steadily. The stores would then be able to market to this user segment via email marketing, social media and other channels. Ø Word of mouth marketing by customers who win a deal at the store would happen as customers win exciting deals at the store outlets Ø onSPOT allows stores to announce FLASH DEALS. For example, a restaurant owner knows that Monday afternoons are when he’s not going to get many customers, he can announce a deal on Monday morning flashing 20% off and a free ice-cream which can be approved within minutes and available to the right audience – on the mobile app of onSPOT. Announcing a deal on GroupON or similar platform takes a few days and discussions before the deal goes live. Such deals are accessible to anyone and everyone. Stores can announce deals on their FB page for their fans etc but verifying whether someone is a fan or not and deserves a deal is a tedious task. Such Flash deals would boost sales during lean period. Ø On win of a deal, a customer can be asked to enter a review, testimonial for the store using an auto generated email. Such reviews can go to the store website, FB page and other channels.     Why will Store Owners Sign Up: Ø It’s not possible for stores to give a giveaway of 30% off to 100 customers but they can afford giving off 90% off to one in 500 customers which would generate a lot of word of mouth marketing, social media activity and more. Ø Announcing deals on platforms like GroupON etc rarely make money for the store.  Its right that such deals bring in a lot of new customers but many of them are deal seekers who rarely return back to experience a fully paid service Ø Stores get access to valuable information on users, their profile and get a tool to engage them via emails, social media and more Ø Get reviews and testimonials from real customers and ENGAGE with them Ø FLASH deals are something which most existing platforms cannot support due to nature of their business operations. Users with the onSPOT app can get access to such deals in a simple yet effective manner. How will it work: Ø onSPOT will install a touch kiosk  /screen at the store premise. For bigger stores, there can be more than one touch points. The customers can just login on the touch device, click play and get awarded the deal. Ø The same customer can also play on their mobile in the onSPOT app and get the deal. The system will have the capability to detect when the customer is in or near the store and pop up an alert. The deal comes with a special coupon code which can be given out at the time of billing for redemption. Ø The store will get a backend system where they can specify deals, specify what % or number of audience gets what deals and more. Ø The store owner can also announce a flash deal which displays on the mobile app of onSPOT Ø As customers interact with the stores, they get assigned to the store and the stores can see their customers building up. They get to know which customers got what deals and use the data for their marketing activities within the limits of the onSPOT platform. Ø The platform provided to stores contains built-in marketing automation where they can ask customers for reviews; invite them to the social media channels and more. Ø The onSPOT app will allow customers to access flash deals, play using their mobile phones, post reviews for the stores and more. How will onSPOT make money: Ø onSPOT will charge an initial joining fee for the kiosk and platform (say 299$) and a monthly usage fee (say $119) to the store. Ø onSPOT is free for the customers Ø I don’t have any financial projections ready as of now

• Answer:

  My understanding is that the purpose of most discounts and deals is to get people to come to the premises - in the hope that they end up buying other stuff or becoming regular customers. I think the number of retailers interested in pushing deals to customers who are already on premises would be rather low. In other words, don't get into this area until you really understand the retail and deals space and talk to a bunch of potential customers (i.e. the shop owners) about the idea and get *enthusiatic* support from them. I am not an expert in this area, I might be mistaken. But given that there aren't too many other answers, and I was A2A, I felt I should chime in with this one important point.