I’m looking for help from someone to develop a similar website to groupon – the basic idea is the same. I’m not sure if the best bet is to purchase a clone, and then edit the functionality of it, or to build from scratch, I will listen to your advice on this aspect. It just needs some admin tweaks and a bit of extra functionality built in, which I describe below. The main difference, is that usual groupon clones have 3 access levels – customer, partner (advertiser) and superadmin. This site requires an extra level of access being built in for “city admins”, where the idea is to have 1 admin per city…and they only have access to that one city in the backend. Let me explain what functions would be required from each acccess level.
1 x super admin log-in (total control – need some basic reporting, such as number of coupons sold etc, number of registered users per city.. reports on sales by Date, by City, Quantity Sold, Revenue Generated, Commission Due to city admin, Commission Paid to city admin, Vouchers Redeemed, Payments made, Date of payments, Total payments paid etc). They also need to be able to add new cities to the system.
30+ regular admin log-ins (for each city). (functionality: 1 admin per city, all they need access to, is submit a new deal…to the superadmin, who will approve it before it goes onto that city page. They will also set the comission of each deal they submit (so flexible commission required).
1000+ partener log-ins (these are for the retailers, to login and validate coupons and to tell us if they are VAT registered or not.
Unlimited standard user account (for purchasing vouchers and seeing past orders etc)
OPERATIONS:
I (superadmin) get 30 cities on the website. Each city has it’s own admin, who can submit deals to me for approval. They would also need to be able to create retailer accounts….so that they can add new retailers to the system without bothering me all the time…All the retailer account needs to do, is 1) validate coupon codes against codes in the database (incase you don’t know how it works – when you buy a coupon (as a normal user), you get a coupon code, which you must tell to the retailer to get the deal. The retailer then must collect these codes, and send them to groupon/livingsocial in order to claim his share of the money.) and 2) submit VAT code if they have one..(There is a small complexity with “VAT tax” and whether a retailer is registered or not for it – we would need them to be able to enter their VAT in the back end if they have one. If they don’t have a VAT, the system would need to calculate a slightly different commission percentage. I hope this makes sense!)
I (superadmin) take a 20% commission. Retailer takes 60% commission. The City admin takes 20% (but this needs to be flexible…and set by the city admins, with an over-ride for the superadmin.
When person buys a deal online, they need to get confirmation emails with a coupon code that is generated from system. In the admin back-end, each deal will have a list of all of the coupon codes in the database….and as the retailer verifys them with his log-in, he can click “pay me now” or something, and all the coupons he has validated he will be paid for…or something along these lines..
We would also need a “recommend a friend and get £6” added to their account in credit….
We would need a bit of facebook integration – share this deal on facebook (pretty easy) and also log-in with your facebook account..just to make it nice and friendly if people don’t want to create another account.
There would be around 30-50 “cities” on the site….each with it’s own subdomain…london.big-deals.com manchester.big-deals.com … but at the start there would only be 5….and in the first year…maybe around 15 in total while we are growing.
This is really 95% of what we need….I think I have mentioned all the important features.
The only other feature I can think of, is the “sign up” process that you get on livingsocial.com, where you have to choose your city, and email address before you can view website….some sort of lightbox would be good here maybe?
All of this would need to be done with a classy, but simple web 2.0 design…which I’m happy to help with..
Timescale to have the whole site and system completed is around 1st March next year…to give us time to test it etc.
Look forward to your proposals.
