DropClaim

The Problem

Merchants sitting on aging, seasonal, or overstocked inventory have three bad options:

• Flash sales are blunt — a fixed discount leaves margin on the table, trains customers to wait, and still sees 5–10% cart abandonment at the moment of purchase.
• Traditional auctions are slow — bidding drags on for hours or days, killing the impulse that drives a sale.
• Manual clearance ties up cash and shelf space while the value of the stock keeps decaying.

What merchants actually want is urgency and FOMO — a reason for shoppers to show up, watch, and buy now — without the abandonment and margin problems of a discount code blast.

The Solution

DropClaim introduces a reverse "drop" auction: the price starts high and decays live, second by second. Shoppers watch the number fall and decide the exact moment to claim — the first to click BUY NOW wins at the current price. It's a real purchase, resolved in seconds, that turns a clearance event into a spectator sport.

**What DropClaim is not:**

• Not a bidding auction — there's no waiting hours or days; a drop resolves in minutes.
• Not a fixed flash-sale plugin — the price is dynamic, not a static percentage off.
• Not a raffle or giveaway — every drop ends in a genuine, paid Shopify order.

Brand values baked into the experience: urgency (every second counts), transparency (what you see is what you get, live), simplicity (set up a drop in minutes), excitement (a gamified claim moment), and trust (secure checkout through Shopify).

Design Targets

Note: The figures below are product and engineering design targets — the goals DropClaim is built to hit — not verified merchant outcomes. Real merchant case studies will be published as live data accumulates.

• < 1% abandonment at the win moment (vs. 5–10% typical of flash sales), by resolving intent to purchase in a single locked-in claim.
• ~2× clearance velocity versus a traditional flash sale.
• +20% AOV on multi-unit drops via clearing-price dynamics.
• < 100 ms real-time price-tick latency to the storefront.
• Negligible storefront load impact — the widget is designed to stay out of the critical rendering path.

Capabilities

Auction creation & management

• Pick a Shopify product/variant; set start price, floor (minimum) price, duration, and quantity.
• Product data is snapshotted at creation (title, variant, original price, image) so a drop stays consistent even if the catalog changes.
• Per-customer purchase caps (maxPerCustomer) and product validation before a drop goes live.

Real-time price drops & live audience

• Prices decay live and stream to every connected shopper over WebSockets.
• Live viewer count per auction, with peak-viewer tracking, to amplify the "everyone's watching" pressure.

Claim → confirm → win checkout flow

• Click BUY NOW to lock the current price, with a 10-second confirmation window to complete the claim.
• Overflow queue with positions when every unit is momentarily held in someone else's checkout.
• 3-minute payment window to finish paying before the claim is released.

Multi-quantity drops

• Sell multiple units in a single auction with a live "X of Y remaining" indicator.

Reminders & waitlist

• Shoppers sign up to be notified; DropClaim sends pre-drop reminder and live-now emails so an audience is already waiting when the drop starts.

Recurring auctions & templates

• Schedule recurring drops that auto-spawn the next occurrence.
• Save reusable auction templates (start/floor/duration presets) to launch new drops in a click.

Merchant admin

• Dashboard, analytics with tiered history depth, and settings for default durations and discounts.
• Brand customization — primary/accent color, button label, and celebration emoji on the auction UI.

Storefront widgets (Theme App Extension)

• Product-page auction badge (banner or compact style) and an app-embed nav link with an optional "Live" indicator.

Trust & compliance

• GDPR/compliance webhooks (customer data request, customer redact, shop redact) and clean app-uninstall handling.

Billing

• Freemium ladder with usage metering (monthly auction counts, concurrency, duration, and feature gates) enforced per tier.

Built With

Architecture Highlights

Reverse-auction price engine. Each auction transitions SCHEDULED → ACTIVE via delayed BullMQ jobs, then a self-rescheduling 1-second tick recomputes the current price with a linear decay from start price to floor. Redis caches per-auction state and viewer counts so the storefront reads are fast and never touch the primary database on the hot path. Auctions end on a floor-hit or a winning claim; recurring drops automatically spawn their next occurrence.

Checkout without draft orders. When a shopper confirms a claim below the original price, DropClaim creates a single-use, product-scoped Shopify discount code (1 use, 5-minute expiry) and sends the shopper to a cart permalink carrying that code plus claim/auction attributes. The paid order is then matched back to the claim in the orders/create webhook (via note attributes, with an order-tag fallback), which marks the claim a WIN, completes the auction, and increments units claimed — all in a single database transaction. If discount creation ever fails, the shopper still reaches checkout, so a drop never dead-ends.

• OAuth scopes: read_products, write_discounts, read_orders, read_customers.
• Claim state machine: PENDING → WIN, with explicit loss states for confirm timeout, payment timeout, payment failure, already-won, and leaving the queue.
• Real-time transport: a standalone Socket.IO server with per-auction rooms broadcasting price:tick, auction:started/ended, and viewer:count, isolated on its own port to avoid dev-tunnel and HMR conflicts.

Pricing & Plans

Freemium ladder billed through Shopify Managed Pricing, with a 7-day trial on paid tiers. Annual plans save roughly two months versus monthly.

The Free tier is a genuine, working entry point — merchants see the full price-drop and claim experience — with volume, analytics depth, and advanced features (recurring, manual pricing, multi-product, brand customization) unlocking as they upgrade.

DropClaim is an original product of RinZin IT / Vista SysTech.