"Coupons" and "gift cards" for shops - one possible solution to No Loots.

mastermesh · 02-09-2010, 16:55

Here's an interesting idea I thought of last night while watching an episode of the Office where they did a "golden ticket" deal like seen in Charlie and the Candy Factory movie...

Lets allow shop owners, and other avatars that wish to promote a shop for whatever reason, create coupons for shops. This would be done at the estate terminal, in much the same way that tickets for events are created at the event terminal.

The shop owner, or whoever wants to, would pay x amount to the terminal, and that would be the tt amount put on the coupon. Coupons could ONLY be used at that particular estate where the coupon was created, and would not be allowed to be TTed.

Then, the people that the coupon is given to would be able to use the ticket in addition to peds/pecs on the pedcard to pay for things at the particular shop that this ticket was created at. Essentially, the creator of the coupon would be TTing items (or at least partial items since pedcard would be needed to finish up whatever is still owed above the coupon amount) in the shop to avatars with coupons who buy things at the shop and the creator of the coupon would be paying the taxes on that purchase at the shop.

Possible uses for coupons
- replace no loots.. technically there is no actuall TT value to coupons since coupons cannot be TTed. If they could be sold to TT they would be pointless since everyone would just TT them instead of using them as incentive to go shopping. Coupon creator would get the option of entering the coupon in to the loot system, pulling it out like is done with event tickets, or leaving it in the estate terminal as a fee shopping incentive for folks visiting the place that look in the estate terminal, sort of similar to the way event tickets are sold at event terminals... but in this case, the coupons would be free instead of costing more than ticket is worth like event terminal does, etc.

- Gift Cards - in this case other folks other than shop owner would be buying the card for their significant other, society mate for their birthday, or whatever.

- Although they could not be TTed or auctioned, coupons could be traded around... perhaps this could become a hobby of someone wanting collect a bunch over time to buy something big instead of doing one huge deposit, etc.

just a few reasons this is a good idea...
- gives avatars a reason to visit shops more often.
- creates a way for no loots to go away
- gives shop owners a way to do more productive and interactive advertising than the existing ad terminals and sign systems do... I think a lot of avatars just ignore ads on the terminals and signs most of the time just like in real life we phase out commercials on tv after seeing them one time.
- creates a neat way to create event prizes that can only be used in certain shops - yet another plus for shop owners wishing to sponser events... results in more events that are more productive over time.

davidgr1200 · 02-09-2010, 18:47

Sounds like a very complicated idea and I wonder how shop owners would look at this? How much are they willing to give away to attract potential customers? Personally I think that there are a lot of other things that MA/FPC need to do first and I doubt whether this is high on the list of anyone's priorities.

Svenn · 02-09-2010, 18:50

This is a pretty cool idea, but as listed above, I doubt this is high on any priority lists. It would take a lot to implement something like that and I'm not sure how much it would be used.

It would be nice to get rid of the no loots though...