Archive for the ‘Deal of the Day Websites’ Category
Visit Toyflow
Toyflow.com is a new Canadian-based deal of the day site that sells toys and other children’s products to customers in the United States and Canada. The daily deal site has now been through two phases of development and has been in production selling products for the last month. The site was designed with some very unique features in addition to the typical features you would see on a deal of the day site.
- Since the deal of the day site sells its products to customers in the United States and Canada, there were some customizations that needed to happen to accomodate the diverse customer base.
- The site is fully internationalized when it comes to language and can be configured to display text in both French and English.
- Toyflow accepts both the Canadian Dollar and US Dollar. A user can elect to show prices for the products in either of these currencies as well as shipping costs, tax, and discount codes.
- The site utilizes geolocation to determine which currency to show to a visitor as well as assists the user in filling out their order info by pre-filling their country, city, and state/province based on this geolocation data.
- A full shipping integration has been built in order to allow the site to compute shipping costs to the United States as well as to Canada. The entire shipping process has been fully automated. The client can export orders to UPS Worldship for printing labels, print packing slips, and process returns using RMA numbers.
- Canadian sales tax is calculated automatically based on the GST and PST taxes in each of the Canadian provinces
- The site has the ability to feature side deals in addition to the standard deal of the day. These deals can be scheduled based on date or on inventory.
- Integration with Moneris for secure credit card payments directly on the site.
- Ability to tag products for use in reporting. Products can be tagged and placed into various categories so that sales can be analyzed to see which groups of products are selling the best. This reporting is built into the site’s administrative console and all reports are exportable to Microsoft Excel.
We at Halfslide Design really enjoyed working with David and Terry at Toyflow on the development of their daily deal website. They are excellent communicators and have an excellent business plan. In addition, they did a superb job of planning the website design project and clearly illustrating the requirements of their site. If you haven’t checked out Toyflow.com yet, give it a look and grab some toys for your kids.
Visit Toyflow
Tags: Daily Deal Site, Daily Deal Website, e-commerce, Moneris, PHP, Toys, UPS, UPS Worldship, web design, website design, websites, wordpress site design
Posted in Clients, Deal of the Day Websites, Projects | No Comments »
Visit Lure Depot
Lure Depot is a daily deal website recently completed by Halfslide Design. We were contacted by the owners of Lure Depot about creating a daily deal website that would feature their fishing related products on a daily basis. In additional to featuring one daily deal, the clients wished to be able to feature up to an additional two side deals each day in a manner that is similar to other deal sites. The site also features:
- Configurable product options: the client can fully configure how the products are listed such as when each daily deal ends, how many pictures to show on each product, how many features, etc…
- Each product can feature videos hosted on youtube. Each video is listed in the sidebar of the product and plays in a pop-up window when the visitor clicks to view it.
- The site features a mini-CMS that allows the client to add/remove/update any pages on the site such as the About Us, FAQ, Contact us pages. The CMS features a mini-WYSIWYG editor to allow the client to have full-control over how the page is designed.
- Integration with Google Checkout, Paypal Website Payments Standard, and Paypal Website Payments Pro. Each of these integrations can be turned off at any time.
- The ability to add discount coupons that provide various configurations of discounts such as a fixed price, percentage of order cost, free shipping, etc… Each coupon can be controlled to expire at either a future date, or after a certain number of uses.
- A customizable schedule that allows the client to setup an unlimited number of future deals and configure how long each deal lasts. In addition to scheduling the main daily deal, the client can also schedule up to two more side deals.
- A listing of the previous five deals featured on the site to give new visitors an idea of what products have been recently available.
- A ‘Past Deals’ page that features the most recent deals that are still available to purchase. This gives the client the ability to continue to sell a product to visitors who may have missed them when they were originally for sale.
- Customers can setup accounts on the site which will allow them to see their order status as well as store their checkout information for quicker purchases in the future.
Visit Lure Depot
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Visit Countshop Daily Deal
Countshop.com is an online retailer of fine watches with an international client base. The owners of Countshop contacted us at Halfslide Design about creating a daily deal store to complement their current e-commerce website. Halfslide recently completed the work on the site and is happy to announce a successful launch.
The site is built with a goal of being easily reproduced in the various languages of the countries that Countshop seeks to market to. Halfslide Design built the site fully internationalized so that it is easy for the client to swap out language files for customers in Sweden, Japan, Brazil, etc… The site also features:
- Configurable currencies to allow each site to sell products in the native currency of its targeted market. For example, the Swedish Countshop site will list all products in the Swedish Krona (Sweden has not yet adopted the Euro).
- Configurable product options: the client can fully configure how the products are listed such as when each daily deal ends, how many pictures to show on each product, how many features, etc…
- Each product can feature links to comparable prices at other competitors in order to showcase the savings that Countshop provides over its customers.
- The site features a mini-CMS that allows the client to add/remove/update any pages on the site such as the About Us, FAQ, Contact us pages. The CMS features a mini-WYSIWYG editor to allow the client to have full-control over how the page is designed.
- Integration with Google Checkout, Paypal Website Payments Standard, and Paypal Website Payments Pro. Each of these integrations can be turned off at any time.
- The ability to add discount coupons that provide various configurations of discounts such as a fixed price, percentage of order cost, free shipping, etc… Each coupon can be controlled to expire at either a future date, or after a certain number of uses.
- A customizable schedule that allows the client to setup an unlimited number of future deals and configure how long each deal lasts.
- A listing of the previous five deals featured on the site to give new visitors an idea of what products have been recently available.
Visit Countshop Daily Deal
Tags: Daily Deal Site, Daily Deal Website, e-commerce, Google Checkout, Paypal Website Payments Pro, Paypal Website Payments Standard, website design
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An article in the Austin Business Journal today, Daily Deals for Austin Moms website in the works, talks about a new daily deal e-commerce website opening here in Austin. This article demonstrates what I’ve been telling my clients for years, daily deal sites are a great way to reach out to a broad customer base and keep them coming back. These types of sites continue to pop up on the web selling anything from baby products to custom jewelry.
The new trend seems to be targeting sites for geographic locations such as cities or social networks. Sites such as Groupon sell coupons from retailers in cities such as Austin, Denver, Atlanta, and Baltimore. While the audience is constricted more than what you would expect for a national or international site that sells products from a specific category, I believe that you can reach a broader type of customer and you can take advantage from social networks as friends tell their local network about the deals they’ve seen through tweets or posts on facebook.
It’s interesting to see these types of sites pop up. If you are reading this and are interested in discussing a daily deal site with us, please contact us through our contact form or send an email to info@halfslide.com. We’d be happy to discuss your project and even just answer some questions you might have about a daily deal site.
Tags: austin, daily deal, ecommerce
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Visit Shirtaday
For the last three weeks, I’ve been busy completing a total redesign of Shirtaday.com. The site was originally created in early 2006 and was extremely simple at the time. During the next three years, it progressively grew new features and each of these features were bolted on without keeping a consistent object model or design. It turned into a maintenance nightmare. Also, the design had several cross-browser issues with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 6. It also looked poor at smaller screen resolutions. These are just a few of the issues…I could go on forever about things that I hated about the site.
The goal of the new design was to resolve all of those issues mentioned and to really just make the site much easier to maintain. Previously, if I changed something, I never really knew for sure just what that’d affect on the rest of the site.
A few of the things that the redesign accomplished:
- Better SEO. On the old site, the links to shirts and pages in the warehouse were built using query parameters such as “shirt.php?id=1″. Most modern search engines completely ignore the query parameters, so our 700+ shirts were being treated as essentially one page.
- Paged Warehouse and Shirt Listing. At one point, the warehouse contained over 120 shirts. All of these were loaded on the single warehouse page when the user viewed it. That was a lot of data to load and display, and if you were on a slow connection, it was painful to wait for it all to come down to your browser. The new design incorporates paging of each list and allows the user to search through the lists using some new search functionality that we built into the site. For instance, if you want to buy a black, large shirt for less than $10, you can narrow your search to this so that only shirts relevant to your criteria are displayed.
- Better design. The original design was table-based, and some tables had tables within them that went three to four layers deep. Ouch. What a nightmare that was to maintain. The new design is completely css based and is much more straightforward to maintain and enhance. New pages and sections can be plugged in or move around extremely simply.
- Better navigation. The main goal at shirtaday is to sell t-shirts and i think the new design helps shirtaday reach that goal better. I believe it’s more intuitive for a user to come to the site and get through a checkout with a shirt they like. Purchase options are emphasized with bold print and highlighted colors.
- Ajax and jQuery. The new site utilizes ajax and jQuery for many things like voting for your favorite shirt or adding an item to your cart. This, in my opinion, really enhances the user experience at the site.
Visit Shirtaday
Tags: ajax, cross-browser, CSS-based Design, e-commerce, jQuery, shirtaday, t-shirt site
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Now that I’ve completed work on two successful “Deal of the Day” sites, I receive a lot of questions about them. This post is for those out there who are weighing the possibility of building their own daily deal site. In my opinion, daily deal sites are beneficial for several reasons:
- Google loves daily deal sites. From all of the reading and work I’ve done with Search Engine Optimization I’ve seen how having dynamic content helps your page rank. Google is not going to rank your site high in their listings if you haven’t changed your site in weeks. So having a new deal every day creates dynamic content and boosts your page rank.
- A daily deal site is a great way to build a large core or regular visitors. Many ecommerce sites would love to have visitors checking their site periodically. If you have a daily deal site, you are providing your potential customers with a new item to purchase every day and therefore, your customers are reminded to check your site regularly.
- Daily deal sites act as a fantastic funnel to your primary ecommerce site (if you have one). A great example of this is Hataday.com. Hataday is associated with Just Sports. Hataday receives thousands of page visits every day and each of these visitors sees the Just Sports logo clearly at the top of the Hataday page. Visitors, if they like what’s for sale on Hataday, can click through to visit Just Sport’s main site, creating new sales opportunities for Just Sports that were previously unavailable.
- There are many daily deal tracking sites like Cheapofeed.com that do nothing but categorize and list the deals being offered on daily deal sites. This is free advertising that is not generally available to most other types of ecommerce sites. The people who regularly visit these sites are people who are very interested in buying something. This means that when you get a hit from one of these tracking sites on your daily deal site, you already have a visitor who is primed for a sale and intends on buying something.
All in all, producing a daily deal site is well worth the expense in time and money. They can be designed so that they can be managed with minimal effort and provide a vast array of benefits. If you are interested in having a daily deal site created and managed by Halfslide Design, contact us here.
Tags: Daily Deal Website, Deal of the Day Website
Posted in Deal of the Day Websites, Recommendations | 1 Comment »
I recently finished work on hataday.com for a client at JustSports.net. The site functions similarly to Shirtaday in that a new item is put up for sale every single day and only a limited number are available. It’s all based on the woot.com business model. The only difference with this site is that there is no price decline with each item that is purchased. This makes sense as the hats are all pre-ordered so there is no cost decline as with t-shirts.
The site was my first interaction with authorize.net. Overall, I would say that they have a strong product offering. Their developer integration documentation is very rich and their example code covers just about everything you will need to do a full integration. I wasn’t pleased with all the hoops you have to jump through to get started with them though. For example, in order to get a developer account, you have to basically send them an email and they will get back to you in a day or two. With paypal and google, all you do is create an account through their websites and you are off and running. Much simpler and allows you to do everything you need to do without getting help from their support teams.
There weren’t too many suprises with this site and it looks to be a really good front-end for justsports.net. Let’s hope they can get some traffic flowing to the site through all of the deal of the day sites so that they can be successful.
Tags: Authorize.net, Daily Deal Site, Google, Hataday, Paypal
Posted in Clients, Deal of the Day Websites | No Comments »