Starter Ideas and Examples

The following is a rough list of potential implementations, ideas, and starting points. All of these are just rough suggestions meant to provide inspiration. Feel free to combine multiple ideas or go completely outside the box and not use any of the sample ideas.

NFC Payments

All iPhones and most Android devices support some sort of NFC functionality. A cool experience may be if you could touch any 2 devices (back to back) and this completes a payment. Another possibility is to use some static NFC tag (with a merchant’s payment address, for example). The customer can then tap their phone on the tag to pay.

Bluetooth Payments

Bluetooth allows nearby devices to communicate with each other seamlessly. Some sort of Bluetooth payment solution may be a viable option.

Voice Ordering

Oftentimes, we may want to order food without having to look at our phone or scroll through a never-ending menu. Voice ordering could be a neat solution for this. You may also layer in AI tools to help the user pick what they want. Consider using Siri or Google Assistant to help with this, but don’t be scared to build your own interface and use ChatGPT or something else on the backend. It would be very impressive if a user could just say, “Hey, I am driving to the coffee shop to meet with 2 of my friends. Could you place an order for 3 coffees through the Purs app. One of my friends is vegan, so keep that in mind.”

Telegram Wallet

Many social media platforms like Telegram, Discord, and others have open APIs that support bots and more. As a bonus, users are already on these platforms, so user acquisition can be very simple. It would be cool if I could interact with a Telegram or Discord bot to pay friends or order coffee. Simplicity and user experience are key for this project idea.

Viral Payments + Promotions

New concepts and viral apps are constantly coming and going in the internet age. Think of apps like Venmo, Snapchat, Clubhouse, and more. At one point or another, all of these apps delivered a unique user experience which helped them acquire lots of users. If working on this thread, be careful to avoid creating something that already exists. Remember, the goal is to incentivize community centric commerce. Think about how this solution could help a small local business go viral and connect with tons of new customers. One idea could be referral rewards. For example, if a user refers their friend to join the App and their friend places an order for coffee, that user could receive a % based incentive from the merchant in the form of app credit / free coffee.