Merchant reviews / rave about this merchant / merchant discovery

A bit inspired by the ‘badge for first person to pay at a merchant’ on the extraordinary ideas board, I wonder if there could be some kind of merchant reviews system (primarily thinking about helping people discover popular local merchants or getting tips)

Maybe people could be encouraged to ‘rave about’ a merchant if they are the first one there or add a review. Monzo should be able to identify smaller merchants as opposed to big chains based upon location and total transaction volume

Why would I like this feature?

  • It would be quite cool to learn about new merchants in the area that are popular (maybe ones near my house or work)
  • It would be cool to get tips from other Monzo users (like the ones on tripadvisor about requesting certain rooms in a hotel or tickets at an attraction etc)
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I guess the feature you’re suggesting would require Monzo to build a feature in the app for users to discover these merchants from & I’d rather the other items on the roadmap were delivered first (not that you were suggesting that they shouldn’t be). Also, my first instinct is that Google etc. is the more common place for users to look.

But Monzo could share the total value / number & average value of Monzo transactions at these stores (once there have been enough transactions to reliably anonymise the data) which might be more useful than Google’s Areas of Interest feature & popular times

and that might lead to merchants promoting Monzo too. It’s an interesting idea :thinking:

Since this isn’t a ‘core’ banking feature, it would be nice if a 3rd party developer could build an app to create this feature. But that would depend on Monzo sharing the data that I’ve mentioned via the API & I haven’t heard any mention of a plan to share aggregated data yet.

This could be pretty cool! Maybe a shortlist of the 5 most popular from each category within a certain geographic range? Or most popular at a particular time of day within a certain geographic range? (to separate good places for lunch or dinner for example.)

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Factoring in times would be even better! And perhaps other data such as the user’s age / average monthly spend etc. so that users could see merchants most visited by their peers?

I expect you’d want a pretty similar algorithm to the one that will be used to make the Monzo’s insights useful.

Some cool ideas!

One thing I was thinking about it would be some way of focusing on discovery in it - for example it wouldnt be so interesting to find out that Starbucks is the most popular nearby coffee merchant but if there was a new / small merchant that has a lot of loyalty that could be interesting

Overall I think there is some really interesting opportunity for expanding merchant information/loyalty/discovery/promotion - my feeling was Monzo’s engagement/tone of voice would be quite a good fit for getting merchant feedback/reviews

I wouldn’t mind anything around it as long as system is not easy to abuse with fake reviews. I like ideas around revenue/purchases/etc actually made with Monzo to make it more trustworthy. It should be data driven, rather than only based on (subjective) “4/5 stars”.

There are some interesting filters/categories around it:

  • most often visited spot per customer (more regulars = more likely to be a good spot. Otherwise Starbucks indeed wins)
  • cheapest food based on avg spent (who doesn’t love it, especially when it turns out to be actually edible)
  • most popular during winter break in X location

It could also tap into discounts and promotions, but that needs to be smarter than O2 Rewards type.

I wonder if it could anonymously ask other Monzo user for feedback - kinda like Amazon answers. For example, I see that one Monzo user used hotel in some town. With quick tap, I can request ‘yay/nay’ comment, or maybe even full comment if another user cares enough.

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I agree! It’s important that any sort of review system needs to tie in with our core product, otherwise we digress into a totally different area of focus. Smart recommendations selected and displayed based on aggregate data would work :ok_hand:

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