Deals

Run your very own groupon-style deal engine alongside your website. You can publish & sell deals with automatic voucher/coupon generation for end users. Apart from that, you can make money by selling business owners membership to publish deals in your directory or offer it for free.

To use the deals functionality you must have either "Pro" or "Enterprise" license.

Deals Settings

The deals functionality can be enabled from admin panel, by checking "Enable Deals" on "Deals Settings" page under "Settings" menu.

Being on this page you also need to provide the payment gateway related settings.

Paypal Email - This should be the email of Paypal account where amount can be received
Enable Sandbox - Enable it only for testing purposes, because when sandbox is enabled, only mock transactions can be performed.
Payment Currency - The currency you would be using for deals
Currency symbol - Symbol for the currency used
Tax(%) - this would be applied on Orders received for deals

After the deals are enabled and related setting have been saved visitors will start getting a new navigation menu labelled "Deals" on the website; in the next step you need to make sure that your Crowd Vox instance has listing claims enabled. This is required because the deals can only be added by the business owner.

Enable Listing Claims

A business (listing) can only be claimed if claim listing functionality is enabled. The relevant setting is available under "Listing Settings" option under "Settings" menu on admin panel.

How to claim a business?

If claim listing option is enabled, a logged in users will see an option to claim the business while viewing the business details. Please note that the option will only be available for businesses for whom either no claim has been presented or none of the presented claims has been approved by the admin.

Clicking on "Claim it now", will take the user to "Claim" form.

When user fills up his details and warrants to be an authorized representative of the business, then after clicking "Claim" his claim is forwarded to the site administrator for approval. The site administrator gets a notification by email about the pending approval. Here is the Listing Claim as shown on admin panel under "Manage Content" menu.

Add a Deal

Once the user's claim is approved by the admin, he will start getting the option that are available for listing owners, one of them is to "Add Deal".

Opting to add a new deal for a listing, user gets redirected to "Add Deal" page.

Here user has to provide information under following heads:

Title - An attractive title to grab the site visitors attention
Category - The category under which the deal is to be posted
Regular Price - The price at which the product / service is available during the days when deal is not there
Discount Type - Options to choose from are Flat / Percentage
Discount - The value of discount (amount or percentage depending on the discount type selected)
Total Deals - The maximum number of deals that can be bought - this can be left empty or 0 can be entered if no limit is to be applied
Publish on Date and Publish on Time - The date on which the deal would be published on the site, a background process would take care of this so that the deal gets published on the targeted date and time
Will Expire on - The date after which the deal should no longer be active / available for purchase
Highlights, Fine Print and Validity - The heads under which the deal can be described to the ones who are interested in it.
Terms and Conditions - The governing terms and conditions
Image - Deal's image, more than one image can also be uploaded.

Published Deals

As mentioned earlier a background task takes care of the publishing of the deals, once a deal is published, it is shown as active and available to the website visitors on "Deals" page.

You can see that there is also an option to filter the deals on the basis of categories they have been posted in.

The deals being linked to the businesses also are shown up when someone views the business (listing) details.

Viewing a Deal

When the site visitor opts to purchase the deal by clicking on "Buy" option, he is redirected to a page that lets him place his order. One can change the quantity he wants to purchase this again would then be validate against the maximum number of deals that the deal creator has set.

This finally would be followed by the transaction handling through the payment gateway.

A user can see the details of the deals he has bought by visiting his profile on website and following "My Purchased Deals" link.

The link under Deal Code(s) takes the user to a window that shows deal's coupon and its details, user can print the coupon from here.