In recent years, with the emergence of credit consumption and the further convenience of electronic consumption, "prepaid consumption" has gradually become popular in society. As a new type of consumption mode, prepaid consumption has penetrated into residents' catering, culture, entertainment, and sports industries, and has become a mainstream consumption format closely related to consumers.
The so-called prepaid consumption refers to the consumer who pays a certain amount of funds to the issuer of the prepaid card in advance in order to obtain a certain commodity or receive a certain service at a preferential price, obtain a consumption voucher, and obtain the commodity or service on a per-order or regular basis. Way.
In prepaid consumption, the prepaid consumption contract is the basis for determining the rights and obligations of both parties, while the prepaid card or other consumption certificates are the carrier of the prepaid consumption contract. From a legal point of view, prepaid consumption is a legal mode of operation and a new consumption pattern gradually developed along with the market economy.
Common prepaid consumption includes single-purpose prepaid cards, multi-purpose prepaid cards, and delivery coupons. According to authoritative statistics, as of the end of 2019, the number of prepaid consumer card issuing companies (including individual industrial and commercial households) in my country has exceeded 1 million, of which 6,149 have been registered, and the sales scale has reached 573.204 billion yuan. It is conservatively estimated that the domestic prepaid consumer market has exceeded 10 trillion yuan, with broad prospects for development.
The positive effect of the prepaid consumption model is obvious. Consumers can enjoy preferential and convenient living consumption after paying a full amount of fees at one time. Operators can also receive payment earlier, while reducing the risk of losing customers, and increase liquidity, so as to continuously expand the scale and achieve the goal of occupying market share and status.
1. Risks of prepaid consumption
Prepaid consumption is unanimously favored by operators and consumers because of its advantages such as discounts and convenience. However, prepaid consumption has the characteristics of prepayment, one-way risk, and information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, which leads to consumers being in a passive position from the beginning, which undoubtedly increases the unilateral risk of consumers. Therefore, during the transaction process, consumers can easily fall into the following consumption traps:
(1) Fraudulent behavior of operators is frequent.
Illegal merchants use prepaid consumption to carry out fraud in the following ways: First, they use great preferential conditions to attract consumers. . Second, carry out false preferential promotion to lure consumers with extra income by applying for prepaid consumer cards, but use various excuses to not honor the agreement during the specific use process. Third, take advantage of legal loopholes to change the industrial and commercial registration, and no longer provide products and services after running away.
(2) There are unequal clauses in the contract.
In prepaid consumption, merchants deliberately formulate some overlord clauses. For example, the membership card can only be used by the registered card holder himself, and has no right to transfer it to others; if the prepaid consumption card is lost, the merchant will not reissue it. and refunded. Even if some merchants promise to transfer and refund, they will set many thresholds in the specific handling, so that consumers have to give up. These overlord clauses are unilateral regulations of merchants, which infringe on the legitimate rights and interests of consumers and are illegal acts.
(3) Difficulty in consumer rights protection
First of all, it is difficult to provide evidence. In prepaid consumption, consumers and operators often pay the money with one hand and get the card with the other. There is no formal contract signed between the two. Once the rights and interests are damaged or disputes arise, it is difficult for consumers to provide evidence for rights protection. Second, the cost of rights protection is high. When disputes arise, merchants often have the upper hand. If consumers want to protect their rights through legal channels, they will face cumbersome procedures and high costs. Finally, because the issuer of the prepaid consumer card transfers assets or goes bankrupt, it is difficult for consumers to obtain prepaid compensation.
(4) Personal privacy is leaked
In the process of handling prepaid consumer cards, merchants often ask consumers to fill in detailed personal privacy information on the grounds of registration information. However, due to the lack of specific terms and conditions, some merchants will sell this information to advertising, financial management, insurance and other companies, and consumers often receive sales calls and text messages, and even apply for credit cards under false names.
2. Causes of prepaid consumption risk
There are many reasons for the confusion in the issuance, circulation, and management of prepaid cards. We can analyze the reasons from the three main roles of supervision, merchants, and consumers.
First of all, merchants, after receiving the advance payment, due to poor management, violation of market order and laws, blind expansion leads to business failure, unable to cash in services or reduce the quality of cashing services. Of course, there are still some merchants who only run away to collect money from the very beginning. On the other hand, merchants are not active in docking supervision, which makes it difficult to promote enterprise filing. The reason is that the main purpose of merchants to carry out prepaid marketing is to obtain liquid funds in advance. After being connected to the supervision, the available funds will decrease instead. Therefore, unless the supervision is constantly watching, they will not take the initiative to file. Finally, the technical cost and labor cost of docking with the supervision system are relatively high, and not ordinary small businesses have the ability to connect.
From the point of view of supervision, first of all, it is difficult to supervise. There are many business entities and more consumers involved. After a dispute occurs, the mediation time is often delayed for a long time, and the final resolution success rate is extremely low. Furthermore, since consumers usually do not sign a contract with the merchant, and the transaction data is also in the merchant's system, it is difficult to obtain evidence and file a case. Even if the case is successfully filed, the merchant is insolvent, and even if the lawsuit is won, it is still difficult to implement a refund. Second, regulatory enforcement is low. The regulatory measures only require groups to issue corporate filings, and there is no mandatory filing for individual industrial and commercial households. In addition to the larger amount involved in group card issuance, the main reason is the large number of small and medium-sized enterprises mentioned above. Finally, supervision usually involves many departments, such as the Merchant Department, Market Supervision Administration, Prepaid Card Association, banks and even public security departments. From fund supervision to mediation to filing to execution, an extremely efficient data synchronization and collaborative supervision mechanism is required, which is quite lacking in the current mechanism. Furthermore, at present, merchant data needs to be actively reported, the authenticity of the data cannot be verified, and there is a lag in the early warning of the fund depository account. These are the reasons for the limited effect of the current supervision.
From the consumer's point of view, the most important thing is blind consumption because of greed for cheap, coupled with weak legal awareness, not signing contracts beforehand, and not knowing how to protect rights afterwards.
3. Solution - Establish a prepaid consumer industry alliance chain
The reason for the chaos in the industry, in the final analysis, is that the most essential contradiction is that users' expected demand for services often exceeds the ability and willingness of businesses to provide services as agreed. The role of supervision is ideally to improve the ability and willingness of merchants to provide services as agreed. However, the current regulatory strategy often makes merchants more restrained, which is not conducive to the operation of merchants.
In fact, what users want is very simple, preferential services, high quality, safe funds and exit. What merchants want is nothing more than working capital and increased operating income. It would be even better if they can lock their own private domain traffic and spread word of mouth. How to conduct supervision on the basis of serving enterprises, and to supervise by means of sparse but not blocked, is the most fundamental problem.
Through the disclosure and traceability of merchant card issuance information, all transaction data can be viewed, counted, and early-warned in real time, and a merchant integrity system can be built to cooperate with financial institutions to solve merchant funding problems, so that the entire ecology can move in the right direction. go ahead. The blockchain is a tool that can meet the above needs.
The alliance chain built on the basis of blockchain, with each regulatory agency as a node, can achieve:
(1) Dispute evidence collection
Improve the structure of prepaid consumption contracts, store evidence on the contract chain;
use smart contracts to standardize the responsibilities and validity periods of both parties, and standardize business processes
(2) Transaction records
Transactions must be executed on the chain to prevent fraudulent transactions
Real-time reporting of coupon issuance and transaction write-off data facilitates early warning of current asset management account balances
(3) Docking third-party data
The cost of docking other alliance chain data from the chain level is much lower than that of centralized system docking
Schematic diagram of the ecological results of the prepaid industry
The value network attribute of the blockchain allows electronic coupons to circulate between people like physical coupons. Through the prepaid consumption industry alliance chain, merchants on the nodes can be urged to adopt standardized card coupon issuance contracts, eliminate overlord clauses, and standardize industry agreements to be reached on the chain, which is equivalent to real-time snapshots and facilitates dispute collection. At the same time, it can report card coupon issuance and transaction write-off data to merchants and consumers in real time, and provide early warning of funds in combination with business operating data and credit status.
In addition, the rights and interests of users and merchants are protected at the same time. For users, firstly, they can exchange or share rights and provide lower-cost access to funds, and secondly, based on corporate credit and service evaluation, users can easily judge the risk of purchasing a card. For merchants, through honest operation, they can quickly and legally obtain liquidity, traffic and word of mouth, thereby gaining a competitive advantage.
4. Introduction of mature landing cases
Whale Mine is a blockchain-based card coupon circulation transaction as the core, with WeChat/Alipay applets, APPs, etc.
Solutions for cross-subject circulation and marketing channels of coupons .
Schematic diagram of Whale Mine business transaction process
Merchants register for card coupon issuance on the Whale Mine Digital Asset Publishing Platform, and can issue blockchain points and coupons by themselves according to the built-in smart contract template, and set the initial sales price of the card coupons and the purchase restriction strategy. Consumers can purchase coupons, transfer gifts, and resell coupons on the Whale Mine user terminal, and also add limited-time promotions, lucky draws, tasks and other interesting ways to mobilize consumers' enthusiasm.
Interestingly, all points and coupons involved in the Whale Mine are issued based on the blockchain and belong to the user's own assets rather than data in a centralized system. Users can even transfer or resell assets such as points and lottery tickets obtained in exchange for tasks to others.
All card coupons and points transactions in Whale Mine are completed through blockchain smart contracts, and all ledgers are recorded in the blockchain, which can be checked in real time and cannot be tampered with, which provides great convenience for docking with the supervision system.
Schematic diagram of the gameplay of Whale Mine
epilogue
In the future, I believe that with the large-scale implementation of blockchain technology in the prepaid consumption industry scenarios in various provinces and cities, it will be able to effectively curb the current prepaid consumption chaos. Of course, the persistent disease of prepaid consumption has been around for a long time and cannot be solved overnight. In addition to the drive of blockchain technology, it also requires the cooperation of local supervision and related industry enterprises to jointly build an alliance chain and promote the standardized development of the industry.
As an innovative enterprise with blockchain technology as the core, Yuhu actively uses blockchain to promote the development of the prepaid consumption industry, vigorously promotes the integration and application of blockchain and government supervision scenarios, and cooperates with enterprises in the prepaid consumption industry to help various The construction and operation of the regional prepaid consumption industry alliance chain.
Reference: People's Livelihood Think Tank | On the Pros and Cons of Prepaid Consumption