Multi-level Marketing Solution for Masses - FYP Idea

"Multi-level marketing (MLM) is a marketing strategy in which the sales force is compensated not only for sales they personally generate, but also for the sales of the other salespeople that they recruit."[wikipedia] Companies that implements MLM strategy, ask you to become their member by purchasing a product and bring other people to buy their products. When new member joins with your reference, the company pays you specific amount from the membership fee or from the profit they earned from the product sold. When your referred person introduces a another member, the profit is shared not only with him, but with you too, sometime even with the complete hierarchy from the first person. The beauty of this model is, each client becomes marketer. This is also known as referral marketing and network marketing.


Suppose, you have products to sell. Under MLM strategy, you assign referral number to each client, and ask them to market the products and introduce each client with their referral number. You keep record which member drives each sale with the help of reference number. At month end, you share a specific amount from profit among all people involved in introducing the buyers. The buyers also become marketers.

So far this model is being executed by large companies only. I want to bring this model to masses. The quality software that manage such business are expensive and individuals or small companies can't afford to purchase and run it. After this product is developed as web application, even a common user, shop keeper, manufacturer or wholesaler can make an account at our website and start offering the product under MLM strategy. So our website would be general product to manage MLM campaigns.

You may be thinking its simple to make this application. Let me share with you a few challenges. If you belong to CS, you must have guessed there is tree structure involved to manage memberships. Following requirements makes the web application complex/interesting:

1. Different companies introduce different type of trees e.g. some companies allow each member to introduce only two person, and refer other persons to the one of your immediate bottom nodes. Some companies want to limited with 3 or 4 or x. number of direct nodes.
2. Companies defines different milestones for their members. When these milestones are achieved, their profit share increases as new members are introduced in the hierarchy.
3. Companies award different prizes for different milestones achieved. The application must keep record of all these prizes and levels when a member achieves it.
4. Some companies assigns points to each product they offer.When a sale is made, they also keep record of number of points the member earned. Total points reflect your profit share.
5. There are different type of memberships, each type has its own rule of profit sharing along the hierarchy. 
6. If you are after making this product for single client, it may be less difficult. But if you want ot make this product as SAAS, where each user can come and start his own MLM business, the complexity is increased as each user would like to follow different strategy of tree creation, profit sharing and so on.

Mainly this product would be web based. Though mobile based version can also be introduced. If you have just 2-3 clients who want to market their products by this strategy, let me know, I would help or may be join you to make this product.