When fully deployed, the Tyme Commerce technology stack would include an omnichannel layer, a data management and analytics layer, an API layer, and a blockchain layer. These layers would work together to facilitate commerce transactions between consumers and merchants. The commerce transactions may also involve payment processors to the extent that payment methods include credit cards, debit cards, card-based electronic wallets, or other conventional payment instruments.

We designed the framework for the platform (please see the pitch deck for a deeper discussion) and we filed a comprehensive patent application that spans various aspects of the Tyme Commerce platform (100+ pages).  A first prototype of UI has been completed, and we expect the technology will be ready for the first commercial deployment by December 2018.

It is hard to determine a total addressable market (TAM) for the Tyme Commerce platform given the fact that it could reach in so many directions, from conducting sales transactions, to handling loyalty for both consumers and merchants, to processing payments via credit cards and cryptocurrencies, to acting as a peer-to-peer money transfer agent between consumers and/or businesses, to holding and monetizing a large dataset of commerce data (including collecting, processing, buying and selling data priced in TymeCash), to helping merchants optimize their supply chains, to helping vendors predict demand and optimizing their distribution networks, and so on. So in effect, if and when fully deployed, the Tyme Commerce platform could touch most areas of commerce, both in the physical world and online.

Additionally, if the Tyme Commerce platform is fully deployed, a number of antiquated technologies could be retired within the consumer and merchant segments. This means that the space of commerce technology providers may also be altered, with some technologies across the omnichannel chain being disintermediated, which could lead to improved economics for merchants and lower prices for consumers while also rewarding Tyme Commerce in the process.

For practical reasons, as a first step in approximating a TAM, we could look at the market size and use of mobile wallets, debit cards and credits cards to get an idea of what the TAM for Tyme Commerce would look like. There are approximately 250M+ mobile wallet transactions in the United States (and growing) annually. 250M+ transactions amount to about $9.4B in dollar volume on an annual basis. Average transaction rates for mobile wallet transactions range from 1.25% to 3% of the transaction value. If we look at debit cards, there are about 47B+ transactions processing annually in the United States. This amounts to about $1.8T+ in dollar volume being processed annually. On the credit card side, there are about 23B+ transactions amounting to about $2.2T+ in processing volume annually. Even if we assume landing at the minimal commission dollar volume of these transactions, this amounts to over $50B in TAM. Tyme Commerce would obviously not aspire to run all of those transactions, but even a fraction of that US TAM, plus the corresponding TAM abroad, could make Tyme Commerce a large global company with a global B2B, B2C and C2C ecosystem.

As discussed, the world of commerce technology is currently fragmented on both the consumer side and on the merchant side. An analysis of the commerce ecosystem suggests that there are many solutions that facilitate consumer and merchant transactions, but do not fully solve the problems that exist in physical commerce. A data point supporting this conclusion is that the brick and mortar world continues to struggle and lose market share against online commerce. On the one side, in-store Point of Sale companies like Toast, Lightspeed or Square allow consumers to transact while engaging with a cashier and usually waiting in line for a period of time. On the other side, there are a number of delivery companies that could theoretically alleviate some of the in-store issues, but consumers are confused by their choices while merchants have to juggle multiple apps. Companies like Doordash, Seamless, and Postmates are fighting for market share, while consumers are fighting for simplicity. Both the merchant and consumer experiences are suboptimal. If fully deployed, the Tyme Commerce platform would create a consistent, aggregated customer experience by allowing consumers to transact when and where they want, while improving the merchants’ economics and operations, whether the orders are for in-store consumption, pickup or delivery.

If fully deployed, the Tyme Commerce platform would also create an ecosystem that would allow local merchants (retail) to finally compete and win against Amazon by providing consumers with access to real-time merchant inventories in the immediate geographical area, to purchase something for quick delivery or pick up. This could allow Tyme Commerce to reinvent local commerce, generate local economic activity, decrease long distance transportation and the corresponding global pollution generated by online purchases, decrease pollution and recycling demands caused by packaging materials from online deliveries, and hopefully contribute to the rebirth of neighborhood stores and local communities built around brick and mortar shopping.

We do not believe that there is currently any effective competition along the lines that we envision for Tyme Commerce that creates a simple and elegant way for consumers to transact while providing to merchants the ability to build engaging customer experiences around their own brands.

Yes, On January 25, 2018 (EST), the founders filed a patent application with the United States Patents and Trademarks Office, serial number 15/879,445, and titled “Omnichannel Commerce Platform with Integrated Mobile Shopping Platform, Online Shopping Platform, Commerce Data and Blockchain Layer.” As filed, the application included 108 pages. 8 drawings and 20 claims. The application was written with the intention that it would serve as a parent application for multiple patent families, where each family would focus on various aspects of the platform, and where individual applications within families would focus on specific inventive aspects.

Please contact us to discuss the platform architecture in more detail.  We are also planning to release a whitepaper shortly with a more comprehensive description of the technology and transaction flow.

The omnichannel layer would include a mobile app shopping platform designed to interact with mobile apps running on consumer mobile devices, such as mobile phones, tablets or other electronic devices. The mobile app shopping platform could provide a customized shopping experience for each consumer, which is based on the branding and user experience that the merchant desires to project to customers. The user experience could be further customized based on information received by the mobile app shopping platform from the data management and analytics layer or from the mobile app itself. For example, the shopping environment displayed to a consumer on a mobile phone for a restaurant may include the restaurant’s standard logo and general look and feel of the merchant’s website, but the order of the food items could be customized based on information known about the consumer (e.g., present first vegetarian means for a consumer who typically orders vegetarian meals), the modifiers for specific meals could be adjusted based on known customer preferences (e.g., deselect tomato add- ons for a consumer who typically avoids tomatoes), specific colors or font sizes could be adjusted for a consumer who tends to prefer certain graphical user interface (GUI) characteristics, and so on. In general, the mobile app shopping platform would seek to use information available about each consumer to provide a customized shopping environment for that consumer that balances the merchant’s branding with the consumer’s preferences.

Yes, also they are early-stage prototypes that will evolve quickly! Please take our prototypes for a test drive here:

Consumer Front-End

Merchant Front-End