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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.