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

iChooseGolf is an exciting new fantasy golf site that seeks to provides a unique fantasy team experience to its users. The basic idea behind iChooseGolf is that a user can create a fantasy golf league, invite his or her friends to join that league by creating their own teams, and then compete against them in weekly matchups. Each team in the league can build a list of PGA golfers through a draft, trades, or free-agent signings.  The team then receives a score based on how that team’s players perform in the weekly PGA tournaments.  A team is matched up with another team from their league once a week and the winner is the team with the highest score.  At the end of the season, the team who has the most victories over other league teams is the winner.

Those who have participated in other fantasy games (such as fantasy basketball or fantasy football) will find much of this familiar.  What sets iChooseGolf apart is the fact that the commissioner has full control over how the league is managed.  Each league’s schedule, score format, matchup format, and draft are all totally configurable and allows the league to find the exact format that is perfect for them.  The league truly has a powerful set of options for completely customizing the entire fantasy experience.

In addition, iChooseGolf has two different types of matchups:  ICG format and Gridiron.  The ICG format is completely unique and allows the league to score each round of a tournament in a different way.  They can setup “Best Ball” for round 1, “Worst Ball” for round 2, etc…  So each week, the scoring can be different, leading to a much richer experience for those who appreciate the strategy behind fantasy sports.

Halfslide Design was able to partner with Magdesign on the implementation of this new site.  Magdesign developed the really excellent layout and graphical elements that you see on the site as well as worked with iChooseGolf’s creator to flesh out the site’s vision.  Halfslide Design was responsible for implementing all of the business logic and UI architecture.  It has been a truly excellent partnership.

Mike at iChooseGolf is the client that every developer dreams about.  All through the project, he clearly communicated his vision in a way that I found refreshing and easy to work with.  I’d gladly work with Mike again any day.

iChooseGolf has just gone into beta so feel free to go over, sign up, create a fantasy golf team or fantasy golf league, and give us your feedback.  You can participate by creating your own league, joining an existing league, or participating in one of their public solo leagues.

Visit iChooseGolf

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.