Beadazzle run two jewellery sites online. One site www.beadazzle.co.uk sells official Pandora Jewellery and the www.beadazzle-boutique.co.uk site sells all other non Pandora Jewellery products. Due to Pandora’s strict selling guidelines, they cannot sell any other products apart from Pandora on a single site.

This meant that if they wanted to buy item Pandora and non Pandora products they would need to place two separate transactions. To make it easier to find products I implemented a Search Suggest feature which is licensed from Code Canyon and modified it to work on Digishop. Then wrote a php script to pull product information from Beadazzle Boutique into the Search suggest script.

Customers can now type in the search box and products from both sites will be suggested to them, and click on a non Pandora product will result in a new window opening for beadazzle boutique. This will hopefully show loyal Pandora customers that Beadazzle sell more than just Pandora.

This script can also be implemented in X-Cart which is what I will be implementing in Beadazzle Boutique.

What is Groupon?

Groupon is a localised daily deal site, that is to say you choose your city and each day a new deal appears on the site, maybe a hotel break offered at a very low rate or a great discount at a particular restaurant. You buy the deal at the price offered, but the deal is only “on” and your card only debited when enough people go for the deal, a number specified by the business seller. The deal is cancelled if at the end of the time frame not enough people have gone for it.

What’s in it for My Business?

The power of voucher sites like Groupon lie in their reach. Groupon itself is a slickly run and marketed operation, with a huge number of users and access via the web and phone apps. As a business, you are getting exposure to a huge audience. In addition Groupon claims that not only do they send new customers business’s way fast, but these usually turn into repeat customers.

But be warned! While Groupon may draw you in with their promise of “you don’t have to send us a penny” -they will take a sizeable chunk out of whatever you take on your deal, sometimes as much as 60% of the money you make. So you’ll need to check and recheck your figures before diving in with your monster offer.

The Guardian recently wrote a pretty unfavourable article -no change there – concerning users’ experiences of Groupon. A lot of their feedback concerned customers having bad experiences with the retailers themselves rather than the site, but some businesses were also none to pleased with the response:

A company that runs boat tours described what it was like to partner with Groupon. The firm said it had received just £6 per person from a two-person voucher for £30. With a boat full of Groupon customers, the firm soon realised it was costing them money to put on the trip. “Groupon would work much better for everyone concerned if they lowered the commission that they take – 50% plus VAT is just pure greed,” the boat company claimed. “Additionally, Groupon holds on to all the funds until the voucher has been used and redeemed. Thousands of vouchers do not get redeemed, and if the use-by date has passed we understand Groupon retains the funds.”

Why use Open Deals?

So we’ve discussed why businesses and customers use voucher sites like Groupon, but why would you build your own site? Isn’t this just reinventing the wheel?

Well, not exactly. Clearly there’s a market for daily deal sites, but the Open Deal module for Drupal seems to be making some pretty big claims. Number one being, as is the norm with the open source platform, the module is free! But perhaps the quick and easy set-up is what’ll prove the biggest draw for developers and entrepreneurs alike.

Have a gander at some of these points and see if you fancy starting your own Groupon style empire! And if you have any feedback on using the module, or indeed Groupon, we’d love to hear from you.

• Easy and Quick Start of a full featured Deals site.
• Based on Drupal 7 and Drupal Commerce
• SEO Friendly
• Loading speed optimized
• Google Analytics E-Commerce integrated
• Free and Open-Source

Just come across an impressive jquery slider on the code canyon website. It does animation and look ideal for an online store.

Try it out here : http://codecanyon.net/item/jquery-onebyone-slider-plugin/full_screen_preview/684613

Full product Information : http://codecanyon.net/item/jquery-onebyone-slider-plugin/684613

http://fitvidsjs.com/

Nick’s an old buddy from Dreamteam Design and brings Jammy Dodgers into the office.

Dave has used his graphic skills to create a strong graphic styled website that sells this high street shop’s unique product range. This site will be content managed and built in Drupal.

jScrollPane is designed to be flexible but very easy to use. After you have downloaded and included the relevant files in the head of your document all you need to to is call one javascript function to initialise the scrollpane. You can style the resultant scrollbars easily with CSS or choose from the existing themes. There are a number of different examples showcasing different features of jScrollPane and a number of ways for you to get support.