Entrepreneurship

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Bargaining Power of Buyer – The bargaining power of buyers is expected to be moderate. Most Singaporean consumers are price sensitive. Despite the lack of local competition, there is limited switching costs for common Singaporean consumers to turn to another similar application that provides better deals.

Threat of New Entrants – The threat of new entrants is very strong. Given there is a relatively low barrier of entry, new companies may enter the market and create a similar application to compete with us for partner merchants and users.

Threat of Substitution – The threat of substitution is moderate due to the trends of decreasing usage of physical vouchers in recent years. While traditional forms of vouchers are still being widely used, it will be a matter of time that digital vouchers completely replace their physical counterparts.

Risk and Contingency Plans

Denial of Redemption

As aforementioned, one broad category of our main target customers are Small and Medium Enterprises (SME). There is a relatively high chance that they face financial problems which may result in decisions to invalidate their digital vouchers after issuing them.

As the service provider, V-Pouch is not obligated to bear the responsibility for defaulting on redemption of digital vouchers. However, to achieve a good customer relationship management, we still plan to have a customer service hotline to assist our users and advise them on actions that might be taken to protect their rights. In addition, it will be clearly stated in our user agreement that all the rights to the digital vouchers listed on the app belong to the issuers, including the right of final interpretation on the terms and conditions attached to the vouchers.

Fake Establishments and Identity Theft

V-Pouch will produce separate interfaces for both the partner merchants and end consumers. There will be a risk that frauds use fake identities to register into our system and issue invalid vouchers. To address this potential risk, we will verify the identity of every partner merchant. When a merchant signs up via the application, they need to upload relevant supporting documents to our server for verification purpose. Only when their identities have been verified by our specialist team, their accounts will be granted access to issue digital vouchers on the platform. Supporting documents may include applicant’s NRIC and the business registration number with Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA).

Methodology

To test our hypothesis, we will conduct surveys and interviews with individual customers and users from different industries and demographical groups as previously classified. Thereby we will have a better grasp of the problems faced by our target audience, and adjust our product designs to better suit their needs. We would build a prototype as our Minimum Viable Product to test and gather our customers’ feedback on User Interface and User Experience. We will start with one customer segment from each category and slowly increase our user base while collecting the data.

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Appendix A.

Prototype of V-Pouch[pic 6][pic 7][pic 8][pic 9]

Comparisons with Existing Applications

Frasers Rewards

Zeek

BechDe

V-Pouch

Wide Range of Establishments

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Customer Service

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Understanding Local Market

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Trading Platform

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Ratings

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