Personal cabinet: an important tool for ICO.
After understanding how to write whitepapers, construct landing pages and code smart contracts comes the question — how should it all tie together to make ICO functional? How will investor go from reading whitepaper on the landing page to conducting a transaction through the smart contract? Here is where personal cabinet comes in.
What is personal cabinet
Investor’s personal cabinet, sometimes referred to as private office or registration portal, is an interface for performing actions within your ICO. It can be integrated into the landing page, or be a separate web portal that, normally, allows users to register, log in their accounts, add wallets for transactions and receiving tokens, and make the transactions.
Although simple in theory, personal cabinet is a complex web-based solution that has major impact on the course of your ICO. Cabinet is a tool, used by investors to process transactions, view personal and general statistics, and make last-minute decisions on credibility. It will serve a team, running an ICO to collect the said staistics, improve conversions and know more about their investors. In fact, Knowing Your Customer (KYC) is an important part of ICO.
KYC (Know Your Customer) is a general name for a practice of taking personal data of the people you having financial dealings with. In terms of ICOs, as with any business that processes transactions, KYC is hugely important, mostly for the legal reasons. Good personal cabinet will provide all the tools needed for automatic KYC –mandatory fill-in fields, document upload function, notifications, automatic data analysis and administrative functions, all in line with the newest legislation, like the GDPR. Generally, KYC process requires an investor to register with their real name, billing address, a proof of ID, and state a source of their funds.
Functions of personal cabinet
Besides easy registration process, well-rounded personal cabinet allows investor to add different wallets for payments, and separately add Ethereum wallet for receiving tokens. Personal cabinet can function as an accounting tool for accepting different currencies, including fiat, and converting them to be processed by the smart contract. Altough most of the math for transactions is done by smart contracts, personal cabinet can also calculate statistics for ICO, graphically showing gathered funds, soft and hard cap, stages and discounts. It can also show personal transaction history for each investor, and be responsible for calculating referral program benefits.
Have it ever happened to you to quit an e-shop on checkout, if you happened to encounter a problem? Having a good personal cabinet is like having a smooth checkout — your customer is at the finish line, you just want them to bar with you a little longer before that ‘Cha-Ching!’ sound is made. This is, essentially, the last conversion of your ICO — conversion into investing funds into your project, and you want it to go as smooth as possible, especially considering the sensitive nature of KYC procedures. Below are some tips that may help you.
Divide registration and filling in personal data for making an investment, as too many fill-in fields can seem threatening to some. The process can go as follows:
- put in your full name and email to register
- confirm your email
- email confirmed, tell us a little bit more about yourself and upload your ID
- wait to be confirmed by administration
- proceed to adding wallets and making transactions
Smooth and stable work of the portal itself is highly important. Refer to the technical tips for a stable landing page to know what could be done.
Good UX and design are also important. Make sure the cabinet is designed in line with the landing page, and all the user pathing is accounted for, including error messages and page transitions (e.g. proceeding to investor’s list of transactions after they made one).
Personal cabinet is a handy tool for accepting investments that requires some serious development. At the moment, market does not offer a universal solution, with most ICOs either developing for themselves, or hiring technical aid. First thing an ICO team needs to decide is functions they want to see, both for investors and for their administrative use, and then find the people who can offer them a solution. Smooth user experience of using an expertly designed cabinet will please your investors, and definitely help minimize conversion losses.
Read more in my article cycle about technical specifics of ICOs:
Overview of ICO technical challenges
