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

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

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.