Thousands of developers are busy building a revolutionary generation of blockchain based applications that will decentralise and democratise the tools we use every day. The dev team here at RefToken has been busy building the world’s first affiliate tracking platform that will allow these developers to leverage the thousands of news sites, bloggers, influencers and marketers working in the space and reward them for acquiring users.
What: Our team has exceeded all expectations and delivered our v0.1 prototype weeks ahead of schedule. Allowing potential users to get familiar with the platform and, for participants in the Blockchain Affiliation Alliance (BAA) to suggest the next batch of features to be added to our roadmap.
Where: The prototype can be accessed at http://demo.reftoken.com and will allow us to assess test cases for end users as well as potential ICO contributors to understand the platform and its potential.
Why: We believe that there is a dire need for platforms like ours to up-end the top-down approach that has defined the industry so far and work bottom-up, building the features that end users ascribe most value to, rather than what is assumed to be the highest priority in some quarterly brainstorm. This approach will deliver a better product faster, improve adoption, provide greater value to token holders, and establish RefToken as the undisputed blockchain affiliation platform.
When: The prototype is live now and anyone can take it for a spin by entering made up credentials (there is no account verification at this stage to enhance accessibility).
Notable features:
Unified Affiliate Backend:
This is the single greatest improvement to the way affiliates manage their activities. Historically, affiliates signed up to merchant’s programs on a merchant by merchant basis (even if all merchants used the same affiliation platform). This inflicted a significant amount of pain on the end user who was required to log in and out of each merchant’s program, export data to compile comparative reports, manage dozens of login details etc. RefToken’s affiliate platform will centralise all the affiliate programs in a single dash, allowing affiliates to sign up, compare, and manage each deal from a single place.
Goals:
These are the steps in a conversion funnel required to achieve a satisfied conversion. E.g: user registration, account validation, purchase. This breakdown will allow affiliates and merchants to identify bottlenecks that impact their overall profitability.
Available deals:
Prospecting and recruitment generally takes up 30-50% of an account manager’s time (whether on the affiliate or merchant side). RefToken makes this a thing of the past, with a listing of available deals that affiliates can apply to with a single click. Merchants will also be able to browse through a segmented directory of affiliates and propose deals to them, eliminating hundreds of hours of tedious manual labour.
ROI reporting:
RefToken will be integrated with all major ad APIs such as Google AdWords and Facebook, allowing affiliates to compile end-to-end ROI reports and compare where they’re best investing their media spend, eliminating a hours of manual weekly reporting.
Reviews:
Currently affiliates rely on merchant reviews that are handled by subscription based third parties whose impartiality is impacted by the need to retain merchants recurring subscription fees. On the other side of the fence, merchants rely on private groups on social channels such as Facebook, Skype and LinkedIn to compare notes on individual affiliates. This is an essential stage of the recruitment process for both parties, and its dependence on singular points of reference is a weakness in its efficacy.
RefToken has introduced a reviewing feature where each party can transparently review the other, crowdsourcing the difficult task of B2B reviews, solving this issue.
Achievements:
We understand that the key to successful adoption of an application is an engaged user base, to this end users will be awarded REF tokens as an incentive to undertake the social and P2P aspect of the platform such as leave reviews & offer deals.