A New Face Of Deals & Coupons
Client Profile: Whoocha is a Groupon-inspired website, highly inspired by
the features and functionalities of the same. The Company also has an
accompanying iOS and Android apps aimed at online retailers.
The owners of Whoocha wanted a clone of Groupon that was to be
PREMISED primarily on its business model. Like Groupon, this coupon
management application must be able to help merchants achieve
economies of scale by prompting a large number of consumers to buy a
certain product.
Development process was divided into two – website development and
application development.
The Challenges:
When it comes to developing an application from scratch, the prime challenge that
developers encounter relates to its customization. The big question here is how to marry
the design to customer’s requirements. Starting from the creation of a User Interface (UI)
to the client’s liking and adding business-specific features to creating a rich user
experience (UX), developers around the world undergo the same trial and error
experience and the frustrations that come with it. Shield Watch too has its moments of
agony.
We had divided the challenges into five categories:
Carousel creation: Designing the desired effects in dancing carousels was quite tough.
Particularly the ‘pop-ups’ – you click on one product image and it readily shows up on the
scene for a closer, more detailed view.
SHIELD WATCH IT Services © 2016 All rights reserved
Mega menu creation: To fit the mega menu into a responsive design was a challenge in
itself. Add to that making the image part scalable. It was an important ingredient for the
site as it ensures that the website easily accommodates more images with the increase in
inventory.
SHIELD WATCH IT Services © 2016 All rights reserved
Matching category columns with corresponding ad space: Ensuring that outdated ads
move out of the space when the expiry date approaches. It called for a tough logic.
Time zone integration: To display the deals to end users (shoppers) properly by
dynamically changing a set of language, country, currency, date and time according to
time zones.
Restrict shipment to the place of merchant’s choice: Eliminating mismatch between the
origins of order placement and intended shipping location. If the intended shipping
address entered by the shopper does not match with the regions served by the
merchant, the order will be blocked.
The Solution:
We had to find technological solutions for each of the challenges that we came across. As
noted above, each of these issues was related to important features of the site and after
hours of work on each of them.
For Carousel: Our developers spent considerably expensive billable hours to customize an
extensive JQuerry-based pop-up and embedded it within the carousel. It added to the
project cost, but the UX enhancement and time-saving we achieved far exceed the extra
expense.
For the Mega menu: A content management system was built from scratch with
CodeIgniter framework and Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. We used Ajax to
handle the continuous filtering part.
SHIELD WATCH IT Services © 2016 All rights reserved
For matching category columns with corresponding ad space: We had to calculate a
path for matching category with shifting images. Our team worked out logic to give
priority to the ads that have less number of days remaining against them.
For time zone integration: Calculate the difference between GMT and the time zone of
the shopper, and then add or subtract the difference from the GMT.
To restrict shipment to the place of merchant’s choice: Enabled continuous syncing
between the client and the server by leveraging Ajax.
Benefits:
The site enabled owners to launch online deals and coupons for a global and multi-lingual
audience. The businesses are not required to pay any fee in Membership Subscription.
Whenever there is a sale, a percentage is automatically deducted from the sales amount
and gets credited to the site admin’s account. Thus the site admin earns a commission
against every sale.
Highlights:
Web application: Tied to a database and web server, the application can be accessed with
any web browser.
System Interface: The User Interface (UI) showcases products/ coupons for different
countries and in different languages.
User Class and Characteristics:
Therearesixtypesofusersonthesystem, each with a specific function. The users are:
• Guests
• Customers
• Business Users
• Agents
• Sub Admin
• Administrators
Country and Currency-Specific Requirements: Country and currency are the two vital
aspects of the application. The Site Admin has to set the list of active countries through
the admin panel. When users access the application, one country will appear as the
default country. Registered users can always change the setting and reset the country.
Upon clicking on any country, the application will display its corresponding language and
currency. Again, the Site Admin manages the list of currencies through the admin panel.
Social Media Integration: In an attempt to garner the power of social media, the offers
are shared in all social platforms. The website too has social media tabs ingrained in its
design, wherever necessary.
App Development: We have developed two accompanying mobile apps – one for Android
and another for iOS platform. The motto was to skip the elaborate part and bring the
indispensible at the customers’ fingertips, on the go.
SHIELD WATCH IT Services © 2016 All rights reserved