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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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

1. Payment – How will the site accept payment?  There are a variety of options: Paypal, Google Checkout, or Credit Card gateways like Authorize.net.  There are pros and cons about each.  Paypal and Google Checkout generally have lower fees for accepting payment but they often require that your customer have a Paypal or Google account to complete the transaction (Paypal allows customers to use credit cards if they don’t have a Paypal account, however).  Accepting credit cards directly on your site is often the simplest method for your customers, but requires extra effort when building the site to integrate with the gateway, secure the transactions, and record orders.  Credit card gateways often have a monthly gateway fee on-top of the per-transaction fee so they are often more costly than simply using Paypal or Google Checkout.
2. Shipping – How will you ship your products and charge your customers for shipping.  I’ve generally seen a variety of methods of dealing with this issue.  Some sites charge a flat rate per item for shipping.  This is the simplest method but can often lead to inacurate shipping charges (the customer is either over-charged or under-charged for the actual shipping charge).  Other sites charge a rate based on the item’s weight and the shipping destination.  This is more accurate, but requires that you weigh each item you plan on selling and be able to store that weight on each item for your checkout process.  Additionally, you need to think about who you want to use to ship your packages.  Do you want to use USPS, UPS, DHL, or FedEx?  Do you want to provide a real-time shipping calculator for each service on your site so that customers can determine their actual shipping charges when they checkout?  All of these things need to be planned so that the designer building your site can correctly implement the shipping process for your site.
3. Communicating with Customers – How will you communicate with your customers?  At a minimum, you should always send the customer an email when the order was placed.  However, you may also want to send additional emails when their order has shipped.  Also, will you want to provide your customers with an option to sign up for special offers?  This requires some extra functionality for your site that keeps track of customers who are signed up for your special offers and their email address and also provides you with a way to send out a bulk email.
4. Order Processing - When you process orders, what pieces will you want to automate?  Do you need to integrate your orders with QuickBooks?  Do you want to be able to print shipping invoices automatically for each order?  Do you want to automatically send your customers their tracking number when their order has been scheduled to ship?  Do you want to be able to issue refunds through your website?  All of these are features that clients often over-look but could make their lives much easier when it comes to processing orders from their online store.
5. Organization of the Products – Many clients know that they want to provide items in their store, but they’ve not thought about how they should be organized.  There are many questions you should ask yourself:  Will I want to feature certain products in certain areas on the website?  Will I need product categories and sub-categories?  If an item is out of stock, do I want to continue to offer it on the site and fill the order when the item comes back in stock?  Do I want to schedule sales on certain items or categories?  All of these questions, if answered before construction on your website has started, will help you get a more robust and reliable site.  Modifying your site after it has gone life in order to add one of these features is always possible, but can lead to bugs or broken functionality.

These are just a few things to think about when building an e-commerce store.  Generally, the more thought you put into your site, the better your experience will be.  I always encourage clients to put together a thorough request for proposal.  This has two major benefits: 1) it enables you to get accurate estimates from various web designers (and be able to hold them to the estimate when they later balk at adding functionality) and 2) it gives you a good vision of what you expect your site to do when it eventually goes live.

If you are interested in an online store or daily deal website, please contact us through our contact form about your project.  We’d be happy to answer any of your questions and provide you with an accurate estimate of how long it would take and how much it would cost to build your website.