On the other hand, there will always be competitors following in our wake and we want to keep our customers informed and excited as we are about our future plans, but if it comes across as being a little bit too reticent with information we hope you can understand!

Service Based Websites

Agriya has identified several key verticals that are ripe for entering and revolutionizing for a global market. We will be creating a new business unit of the company that will build, operate and run these web based services. The ground work is almost done and development and customization has begun (it’s a cryptic clue, we know!) and we’re looking forward to launching the first of our web based services that will serve a specific (non-tech) vertical in the coming months. More service based websites will be launching over the coming year as we look to expand and become more than a products based company.

New Technologies

If you ever saw our profile on some of the popular freelance websites you may have wondered why we called ourselves “LAMPC” (we pronounce it “lamp-see” in the office). The reason is that back in the olden days (about 8 years ago!) PHP and CGI were the open source programming languages of choice for the vast majority of websites. Fast forward to 2012 and there is a myriad of open source languages with their own advantages and disadvantages. Agriya is already branching out from PHP and developing client projects in cutting edge languages built specifically for the needs of todays web applications and we have hired new programmers to specifically learn these new languages so if you want to get a website developed in an open source language other than PHP, CGI or Ruby let us know because we’ve now got the expertise to help you.

Product Development Driven By Agriya Ideas

One of the most innovative developments that came out of 2011 was the launch of our FundProjectsWith.me concept where we took a crowdsourcing approach to developing new products based on specific consumer demand and taking the guess work out of predicting what will be popular in 6 months from now (although our list of successful products that were the first to market really speaks for itself).

Late last year we rolled the FundProjectsWith.me functionality in to our ever evolving Agriya Customers website and it got a new name: Agriya Ideas. The concept is still the same, you suggest which products you would like to see, we take a democratic approach with people voting on projects to take forward to funding and then anyone can contribute money to the project to ensure it gets developed. As a reward for helping to fund a project the investor gets up to double their money back (depending on sales) along with helping to shape the direction the project takes.

All future Agriya products will be driven by this crowdsourced method so that you can get the products you want and Agriya can focus its resources on projects people will buy. If you have an idea for a project, just head over to Agriya Ideas and let us know.

Relaunching Agriya Forums

In the middle of last year we had to shut down the Agriya forums due to far too much automated spam and vBulletin’s inability to effectively stop it. This was a shame because it was a good place for the community to hang out so we have made plans to resurrect the forum using our brilliant Discuzz software – with some modifications of course! We hope to have this new dicussion forum tightly integrated in to our Agriya Customers area and you’ll be able to meet, hangout and chat to other customers, share ideas and get help on specific questions about the software.

Gamifcation…

HUSH! We may have said too much already but gamification for Agriya is here and it’s going to rock your world!

New Project Management Tool For Clients

Based on the remarkable success of our Products Bug Tracker which is based on the famous Mantis software, it incorporates a super friendly user interface for the frontend and a developer friendly backend so that everyone gets the best of both worlds. We’re now working to roll this solution out to our customization and service based projects.

Other Plans

Of course, there are a whole host of additional plans that are in the pipeline but for the sake of confidentiality we can’t announce them just yet!

All in all, 2012 is looking to be an even more successful year than 2011 as we look to consolidate our number one position in the clone scripts market, improving our current range and providing the best software with the best support and updates.
 

January

We kicked off the year with the launch of Nabit, a Yoink clone script where you can run an environmentally aware classified ads website with the unique selling point of everything is free. There are no transactions, it’s all about encouraging people to recycle or take advantage of things people no longer need.

There was also a problem with PayPal that stopped many websites in their tracks that were trying to build a fixed price jobs portal and after our open letter to PayPal things got moving again and they removed the restrictions. We’re very happy that we could make PayPal see sense on this matter.

February

In February we launched the niche classified ads script, Exposure. This product lets you run a classified ads type website focused on a single industry, for example wedding photographers, dentists, dog groomers, chimney sweepers or anything else for that matter. Exposure makes you money because you have a laser targeted focus and local businesses are willing to pay you money to be visible to such targeted visitors.

March

An entire industry has been built around providing entertainment to people after the sun goes down and Nocturnal is the portal software a nightlife company needs to help grown their business. With built in tools for venue and event management, fantastic social networking tools as well as the option for photos, videos and blogs, Nocturnal can become the destination website for all the nightlife and entertainment options for your city, state or even country. One website that has taken full advantage of Nocturnal is Cayman Islands website Party Surfers who rely on Nocturnal to drive their events and business.

March also saw the beta release of our new project incubation website. Named FundProjectsWith.me it was the first website dedicated to helping people fund web based projects and share in the profits. The concept has proven to be so popular that late last year we integrated the website in to our main Customers Site and can be found at Agriya Ideas.

April

The fourth product of the year that we launched was CoupReseller and is designed to capitalize on the massive coupons and group buying markets. Inspired by sites like Lifesta, CoupReseller is a Lifesta clone script which lets people sell their unwanted coupons. Some surveys have suggested that as much as 20% of group deals purchased by people go unused because they forget about them or have to go somewhere urgently which is a huge percentage of unused deals which people could sell on your website.

May

Continuing to help people capitalize on the group buying, daily deal and coupon mania, we launched Couponator, the software that will literally terminate the coupon competition. This site is designed to run on autopilot where users can upload, search, rate and view coupons for any online website you can think of. Working a lot like a RetailMeNot clone, it can automatically feed coupons from affiliate networks like Commission Junction and others to grow your site automatically and let you earn commissions when people make a purchase after clicking on the coupon code.

June

The product launches kept on rolling with the announcement of Burrow, the first Airbnb clone script on the market. With the rise of person to person networks and social networking breaking down the trust barriers, Burrow lets you take it to a whole new level by allowing people to rent out their spare rooms, apartments, treehouses or even an airbed on the living room floor. This disruptive concept has raised Airbnb over $150m in funding and spawned a number of clones around the world. Burrow is also flexible enough to allow people to rent out anything from office space, car, car parking, power tools or anything else you can think of.

July

After 6 straight months of product launches we gave the team a breather to focus on updating the software with all the customer feedback as well as move over to a new support desk integrated in our newly launched customers area.

August

We got back in to the swing of things with the launch of BuySell in August. BuySell is an Etsy clone script where you create a platform where merchants can create mini shops to sell their products. You provide the infrastructure and promotion, the merchants supply the products. It’s perfect if you have ever wanted to create an ecommerce website but don’t have the storage space or can’t afford the wholesale costs to bulk buy products.

Smartphone usage has exploded in the last couple of years and Agriya were once again ahead of the curve with the launch and successful acceptance of our GroupDeal apps in to the Apple iTunes store and the Android Marketplace. Getting apps accepted is a long process and they have to be QA’ed by several independent people before they are accepted. Being accepted and listed in these marketplaces means Agriya has met the highest levels of quality and can compete with any other software company on a global stage.

September

What happens when you mix social networks with group buying with speed dating? A GrubWithUs clone script that’s ready to knock the socks off anyone who sees it. GroupWithUs allows you to run a website where you can organize dinner events in various restaurants in the city, arrange a discount based on bulk buying principles, have people pay upfront and then let chaos ensue – or hopefully just the good times. Group dining where you can meet new people who share your interests is a great way to make new friends if you are new to a city without the stigma of speed dating. This concept is still very new and ripe for the taking.

October

October marked the end of our product launch bonanza as we looked to consolidate and improve on the product range we already had. One great opportunity that happened was our joint venture with a web development company in Japan to offer all our products and services to the Japanese market. Our partner in Japan has been hard at work translating all the scripts to create http://www.agriya.jp which opens up Agriya to a whole new market and brings exciting opportunities for travel.

November

Continuing our new found taste for the orient, we won our first customer from mainland China (we have already been serving multiple companies in Hong Kong) and the project flourished in to a full blown partnership with Agriya sending over a delegation of programmers and senior managers to Beijing to discuss working together on more projects in the future. We’re looking to establish an Agriya brand in China with all our products translated in to Chinese a lot like our recently established Japanese partnership.

December

Agriya are no strangers to sending our employees out to work onsite and in December we signed our second contract with a Dubai based company to have several programmers and a designer work onsite for the new few months. We’re really excited about what the new onsite projects can deliver and have asked all our 200 staff to apply for passports in the expectation that we’ll be getting a lot more projects like this in the future.
 

There is an old saying that’s often rolled out whenever something goes wrong or doesn’t happen in the way you want it to. It goes a little something like this:

Failure to plan is planning to fail

When it comes to building your online business using one of Agriya’s clone scripts like our Etsy clone or Airbnb clone then not having a clear plan of action, or a business plan, is just the same as planning to fail. Can you think of any other business in the world where you can just ‘wing it’ and see how it goes? We can’t!

The beauty of the Internet is that it is such a controlled environment compared to a bricks and mortar business. You can buy visitors to your website and calculate the conversion, you can change the entire layout of your website and track the impact it has, you can network directly with tens of thousands of potential customers, you can contact your past customers at a click of a button and so much more.

However, don’t mistake this opportunity as being the easy path to success, your online business needs as much planning and thought as any regular offline business. Before you even buy one of Agriya’s scripts you should have a business plan in place and know exactly what you are going to do and when.

So without further ado, here are Agriya’s 4 top steps to success when you use one of our products.

Do Your Market Research

Agriya has been telling our customers to focus on niches since day one. Every website started out focusing on a niche and grew from there, you’ll never be able to stock the range of products Amazon do from day one, so don’t even think about becoming the next Amazon, instead, find a specific type of product to sell and become the go to online shop for it.

If you are planning to use our Groupon clone script then you need to mix it up with some offline research. If you don’t already have good connections with local business owners then it’s time to step outside and start knocking on business doors. Find out what their needs are, find out if they have used coupon sites before, what were the positives, what were the negatives, how can you build something that creates a win-win for everyone?

Doing research online is about judging consumer demand. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to judge interest in your niche by seeing how many searches are being done each month, then check out forums and blogs to find what people are discussing, what problems are they facing, how will your new website overcome these problems?

Have A Business Plan

Saying you need a business plan is all very well but if you’ve never written one before then you need to research how to write one. It’s not that you will be submitting it the banks to get a business loan, but it’s important to get the plan on paper so that there are no surprises or you are not sat infront of the computer one day wondering what to do.

Your business plan needs to comprise the results of your market research along with how you plan to actually make money. You need to do competition analysis to see who you will be competing against and find out what they do well and what they do badly.

A business plan will also try to estimate the cash flow in to out and of your business. A brand new website with no prior community to back it up is going to take several months to be generating a good income so ensure that you have the time, money and determination to keep growing the business, even if it’s not making anything to begin with.

Have A Unique Selling Point

By the time you have completed your market research and business plan you should have a good idea of what your visitors are looking for and where your competitors are failing. This is where you come up with your unique selling point to differentiate your business from everyone else.

Woot do a great job of building a USP in the daily deals industry because their website is fun, quirky and they have a particular way of writing to make their deals sound irrevent and awesome at the same time. From their constant engagement with their customers they have built up such a loyal following that even their “mystery boxes” achieve millions of dollars of sales – and the customers don’t even know what they are buying!

A USP can be anything from targeting a certain niche to out of this world customer service to awesome social media engagement to content marketing. SEOMoz are an SEO software company but their USP is the fantastic content they add to their blog for free everyday that keeps people coming back for more.

Focus, Commitment, Determination

Building your online business is going to take time and determination, whether it’s speaking to people in the real world or trying to drive traffic to your website through various Internet marketing efforts. If you have the funds (which should have been identified in the business plan) you can outsource a lot of the work or hire someone to do it for you, other wise you will need to invest your own time in to making your website success.

The key to building a successful online business using one of Agriya’s products is consistency. Nothing will happen without your involvement so ensure that every day you are doing something that is growing your busines, whether it is networking, content writing, SEO, seeking out new opportunities, talking to business owners or something else. If you can spare at least an hour a day to build up your website then you will achieve success in the long term.

If you want help, advice and consultation on how to build a successful online business using one of Agriya’s clone scripts please get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to assist you. If you’ve got any other suggestions on how to make your online business succeed then add them in the comments below!
 

The reason everyone is buying clone scripts is because people want to make money on the Internet. When you read about these high tech companies getting $10m or more in venture capital funding it’s enough to make most of us virtually salivate at the thought of having that kind of cash to build a business.

The reality of the situation though is that like any business, you need to put hard work and time in to making it a success. If we look at some of the most successful sites that have used Agriya’s software like GigBucks, Zerrk, CrazyBees, PartySurfers, Spurr and more they’ve invested time, money and effort in to building their business.

Be Realistic

The first tip that we have is to be realistic with your expectations. Success isn’t going to happen over night and none of Agriya’s products can be called ‘get rich quick’ solutions. What they are are platforms around which you can steadily build an online business and hopefully make a pitch to venture capitalists or angel investors within 6-12 months of your launch.

If you are building a business from scratch then it will take a lot longer to achieve a good revenue compared to if you are using one of Agriya’s products to compliment an existing website or online community that you have previously developed.

Invest A Resource

The second tip for making money with Agriya’s software is to invest a resource that you have. This mostly means investing money on marketing such as AdWords, Facebook Ads, SEO, Social Media, content creation etc. but another resource that you can posses is your time. If you don’t have the money to pay for your promotion then you need to invest your own time in to this.

Investing your time is not a one off activity, it needs to be consistent and done regularly. You can’t build your website, spend a week promoting it and then sit back to reap the rewards, an hour a day everyday will be far more effective than 50 hours in the first week.

If you are building a community based website using our Youtube software then it needs to be seeded with content, information and more. Give people a reason to come back to your site, make sure there is lots of content for them to see and of course ensure that it is constantly updated so if they come back again they discover a whole new load of information. People will only come back to websites when they know the information is fresh and relevant to their interests.

Focus On A Niche

We don’t know how many times we keep saying it, it’s probably a lot, but we’re going to say it again: focus your website around a specific niche. Yes, Groupon and Airbnb have gone global by targeting the mass market but they have an army of marketers, the best PR agencies getting their websites in to the mainstream media and millions of dollars of funding. By contrast we find most of our customers are usually on a tight budget and don’t have the resources to go head to head with the big boys

Sidenote: That’s not to say our software can compete with the biggest players in your market, it can, but we’re interested in seeing your success and helping you do what’s going to be right and successful for you.

If you are going to purchase our Airbnb clone, focus on a country, or better, a specific area of your country. Or focus on a specific type of living quarters like only spare rooms or only places that cost $50 or less. If you want to purchase our Etsy clone, then follow Etsy’s business model and focus on a specific type of product (Etsy have cornered the handmade market so don’t target that niche!).

Be A Person

To get traction to your website and start getting people to not just visit but hang around, signup, buy something etc. is going to take some time. You need to set yourself apart from the crowd and become a real life person that people can interact with rather than “just another clone”. If you start participating in forums and blogs related to your chosen niche, produce great content that’s posted on your website blog then you start to become the authority within the field. People like to deal with other people, not faceless websites with a generic sounding “about us” page.

If you purchase our Fiverr clone script for example, you can start with a blog that highlights people posting gigs, you can interact with people in forums that target your niche so you can get yourself known and taken seriously. Being a person that others can relate to does take time and it’s not going to have a measurable amount of success to begin with but over time your authority builds up and the reputation of your site grows as a result.

Exceed Expectations

Most of Agriya’s platforms are about enabling you to build a community and service which means that you will be dealing with customers and stakeholders on a daily basis. Do what you can to exceed expectations whether it’s in terms of customer service or the value you provide when someone buys from you. If someone mentions you or a business in a tweet, take the time to respond to them, if someone emails asking questions a prompt reply is going to give you a better chance of converting that person in to a customer. In relation to this advice, make sure it’s as easy to contact you as possible, be very clear about what the person is to expect after contacting you and most importantly make sure you keep your promises.

These are just five basic steps you need to take in order to start earning an income with Agriya’s range of online business platforms. There are many other steps you can take and our team of MBA qualified Customer Relationship Managers will be happy to assist and guide you to create and grow an online business that makes you money.

It’s a festive time of the year for most people in the world and even here in India with the mercury pushing 30ºC (86ºF for our American readers) there is a festive spirit going around with the churches holding carol concerts and decorations going up in offices.

To celebrate this special time of the year and to really help you make 2012 the best year ever we have got a time sensitive sale going on with a large number of our most popular products discounted up to 33%. But hurry because this sale won’t last forever and on the 5th January 2012 we’ll be resetting the prices back to normal.
 

25% Off Flipit

Everyday tens of thousands of dollars worth of virtual real estate (websites and domains) are sold on online marketplaces like Flippa. By charging a listing fee and a success fee on the winning bid, companies that enable this type of website buying and selling transaction are raking in thousands of dollars each day. Infact, on the day of writing this blog post, Flippa.com have sold over $70,000 worth of websites which means they have earned $3,500 in 24 hours without lifting a finger!

Flipit will enable you to run a website marketplace where people can list websites for sale, view earning and traffic statistics, ask questions, use an escrow for safety and review seller feedback. It’s the only solution on the market and an incredible way to leverage the hard work of others to make a profit.

Was $1000 Now Just: $750

Buy Now View Demo
 

25% Off Nabit

How much junk do you have in your garage that you haven’t gotten around to shifting yet? What if someone was to come knocking at your door and offer to take it away for free, you’d probably help them load it in to their truck! This is the concept in Nabit, some stuff is just too big or too damaged to sell on eBay but it might still have a use for someone. Nabit lets you build a marketplace of freebies and people from your local area can find stuff that’s available for free.

Since Nabit helps you make a freebie marketplace it can become the go to site for anyone who is in urgent need of something and doesn’t have the money to buy – especially in these austere times. You can profit from this by advertising a number of services like packaging materials, van hire, courier companies, insurance and more. You can also incorporate AdSense ads in to your site and earn money from clicks.

Was $1000 Now Just: $750

Buy Now View Demo
 

33% Off TweetPic

40 characters is big business with Twitter securing tens of millions of dollars in funding and generating good revenues thanks to its sponsored tweets program. It’s also help establish an eco-system of supporting sites that can use the reach and popularity of Twitter to grow and earn an income. One of the most popular sites is TwitPic which in 2010 generated revenues of over $2m just from letting people upload photos and share them on Twitter.

TweetPic works in quite a similar way with short URL’s, discussion options and also lets users share videos that they’ve found. You can make money by promoting images or using AdSense on your site.

Was $750 Now Just: $500

Buy Now View Demo
 

33% Off PeeweePay

1Does your granny know how to sell stuff online? Well if she tried using PeeweePay she would! In 60 seconds or less your visitors can start selling their physical or digital products on your website and it has the flexibility to allow product variations and more. With geo-location based technology, your buyers can find products in their local area to support the local businesses.

PeeweePay is a clone of the hugely popular TinyPay website and makes you money 24/7 like clockwork by charging a commission on every sale that is made. Thanks to the advanced PayPal adaptive payments that’s integrated you don’t even need to worry about paying your sellers because it’s done automatically and you’ll receive your commission instantly.

Was $750 Now Just: $500

Buy Now View Demo
 

33% Off Exposure

Did you know that Sortfolio makes around $20,000 each month from advertising fees? Essentially it’s a classified ads directory with an innovative layout and targeting a very specific niche of web designers. Exposure follows the same principle with a unique layout and design where visitors can browse specific services and view feedback and case studies of the companies that are advertising.

You can make money using Exposure by targeting small niches such as wedding photographers, plumbers, graphic designers etc. and charging them a monthly or annual subscription to be featured on your site.

Was $750 Now Just: $500

Buy Now View Demo
 

33% Off iSocial Pro

Who said social networks are dead? More than ever, older websites are turning to social networks to reinvent themselves or offer a better community experience to their members. iSocial Pro is one of the oldest and still the foremost social networking software you’re likely to need to run a community website targeted at specific niches.

iSocial Pro has everything you need to foster and develop a community of like-minded individuals with features like status updates, messaging, groups, photo albums, sharing of content and more. It’s perfectly designed to allow relevant advertising where you can make money as an affiliate or charge money for companies to put their banners on your site.

Was $750 Now Just: $500

Buy Now View Demo
 

Get Your Freebies!

Never in a million years did we think we’d be giving away these products but the orders came down from high up and have been duly carried out. These products have remained consistently popular since the day we launched them and we’re looking to try out some new business models by seeing what happens when we offer a product for free.
 

Discuzz

In a social world even the traditional internal business processes are being socialized. Discuzz is the best Social CRM solution on the market and designed specifically to help you business in three key areas: customer support, sales and marketing. Your customers can post pre-sales questions or technical support issues and the power of the community combines to answer questions about the product or service, reducing the amount of money you need to spend on resources.

Discuzz has been designed to facilitate traditional forum discussions with a new solutions based approach where someone can ask a question and various solutions can be proposed. If you are not making your business social you are missing out on cost savings and leveraging the power of your company evangelists. Even Agriya is hard at work integrating Discuzz in to our customers area.

Download Discuzz Now
 

MarkIt

Last year Digg made an astonishing $31m which is a huge amount considering that the only thing the site does is let people submit interesting news stories. But thanks to their promoted articles (similar to Twitters promoted tweets) and innovative ad displays more and more advertisers are looking to leverage the massive traffic that Digg can give and hit the holy grail of the “Digg effect”.

MarkIt is a full social bookmarking script that lets you run a website like Digg, Delicious, Reddit and MrWong. With advanced anti-spam controls built in and a full advertising management dashboard your members can submit news stories, network with each other, discuss articles and click on your ads which make you money.

Download MarkIt Now
 

MugShot!

Does your website let users upload a profile pic? Then you need MugShot! to let your users take photos of themselves directly from your website and then give themselves a complete makeover thanks to the awesome filters and special effects that can be applied while the photo is being taken.

MugShot! can be integrated in to virtually any platform and server that runs PHP. A programmer may be required for integration. Your users will the new feature that has been added to your site and now this fantastic software comes with the best price available – 100% free!

Download MugShot! Now

REMEMBER!

These deals are not going to last and on 5th January we’ll be resetting to the original prices. These products are all proven in scale, proven in reliability and proven in helping you to build a substantial income from the Internet. Visit the Agriya Customer Area for more deals and offers.
 

We do have a testing team who’s job it is to find bugs and script problems before the software goes live and sometimes the atmosphere between the programmers and testers can get a little bit icey, like the graphic below demonstrates!

Agriya are constantly reviewing our support processes and product iterations and a few months back we decided to take some inspiration from the open source community and open up our bug tracking to the community and give our customers a centralized point where they can report any bugs or defects with our products.

By crowdsourcing our bug hunting in this way we hope to have a more efficient system where we can locate, reproduce and ultimately fix any bug our products may contain. Crowdsourcing provides the best way to hunt for bugs because although our testing team can identify the major problems and we can release software without any known bugs it’s only when it gets in to the hands of the people that we find all those tiny little bugs. Agriya can never reproduce every scenario which is why it makes sense to have our users or people reviewing our product help us out to produce rock solid and secure products.

For any of the geeks out there reading this, Agriya has adapted the open source Mantis bug tracking software (we’ve been using Mantis internally since Day 1 and absolutely love it!) and given it a very polished interface to make it super simple for anyone to report a bug or suggest a feature upgrade.

If you are a customer of Agriya then you will be able to see all the bugs that have been tracked along with the features that have been requested. You will be able to see the kind of bug, a description of the bug and the status of the bug report. This should give you much more transparency in to the development processes we use here in Agriya and we are very hopeful that it will lead to even better products in the future.

We also should point out that the bug tracker is not a support desk, it doesn’t facilitate two way conversation between the customer and developer so if you need regular customer support please continue to post your issues in the support desk.

Before you submit any bugs we would like you to take a moment to read our “How to submit a bug” article which hopefully gives a bit more insight in to what you should submit and how you should submit it. When you are ready to submit a report (you don’t have to be a customer!) simply navigate to the correct product in customers.agriya.com and in the sub-menu area you’ll see the option to submit a bug.

As you can probably see, Agriya are consolidating a lot of departments under our customers.agriya.com website, we successfully migrated the customer support desk to be more integrated, we’ve introduced the Ideas concept from FundProjectsWith.me and now we’ve added a bug tracker. We’ve still got plenty more exciting features to add such as a new customer support forum based on our Discuzz software and one or two secret updates that we’re sure you’ll absolutely love!

If you’ve got any thoughts on how we can make the customers area serve you better give us a buzz or submit a comment using the form below.

You can follow the progress yourself on Agriya’s new Ideas platform located here: GetLancer Project Feedback.

When the original investors are happy with the product then it will be all systems go as we launch GetLancer to the world. To ensure you are the first person to know about it keep an eye on this blog or our Facebook page where we’ll announce the news.

In the meantime, to whet your appetite we’ve created a 3 minute screen recording to showcase the programmer control panel features. Your programmers are going to spend a lot of time in this section so we’ve taken care to make it as friendly and intuitive as possible.

What do you think of the sneak peak from the video? Let us know your comments below!

Unfortunately using 3rd party tools to add additional functionality puts you at the mercy of those providers and as it turns out two of our biggest providers have cut off the services which many of our customers relied on.

The first is service to be cut off is Google Translation. We used this tool to enable our clients to quickly and easily translate their entire website in to over 50 languages at a click of a button. Agriya were one of the only providers to offer this service and it was extremely cost effective when compared to hiring a professional translator to translate the thousands of words of text.

Google has decided that using the Google Translation API should no longer be free and as some of our customers have found out, any attempts to translate your site now using the built in code will be prevented. In the place of the free Google Translation service, Google have implemented an Enterprise solution where you can pay to machine translate the text on your website. Agriya is looking in to this new API to see if there is a way we can offer cost effective translation services for your website. In the meantime all Agriya’s products let you manually translate your website.

Google’s decision to turn the Google Translation API affects all Agriya products

The second tool that has been restricted to affect our customers is PayPal’s Mass Payment function. Many of our products made use of the PayPal Mass Pay function so that the admin could pay the sellers on their website. For reasons that are not entirely clear, PayPal has started to disable this function in many PayPal accounts which means that our customers can no longer pay all their sellers with one click of a button.

We’re still not sure why PayPal are doing this but from what little information we have received it could be connected with the account activity on your website. Unfortunately there is no way to enable this feature and you will need to beg to PayPal to let you have it.

There are a couple of workarounds available. The first is Agriya will be making sure you can pay your sellers individually and hope to have this new functionality available soon. The second is the adaptive payments option which is available on some of our products where the seller gets paid instantly rather than having to request a withdrawal.

PayPal’s decision to restrict the Mass Pay option affects the following products

• GroupDeal
• FPPlatform
• FPPlatformUltraPlus
• Burrow
• GetLancer
• GroupWithUs
• SFPlatform
• BuySell
• CoupReseller
• Flipit

We’re really sorry about the inconvenience this may cause you and hope to have suitable workarounds in place as early as possible. Agriya is always striving to make better products and incorporate useful features that our clients want, but as you can see here we’re still at the mercy and whims of 3rd party providers.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

The software has gone through several iterations since the 5 original investors pledged their money get this software created and now thanks to all the hard work by the Agriya developers, testers and investors the software is almost ready to be rolled out for sale. We say almost because the investors are busy setting up their own sites and checking for all the tiny little bugs and idiosyncrasies which makes for a win-win situation for everyone because the investors get to setup their site before everyone else and our customers can buy safe in the knowledge that the script has been tested by real people just like them.

Now to whet your appetite about what’s coming up, we’ve taken a number of screenshots to showcase GetLancer with its awesome features and beautifully stylish default design.

GetLancer will let visitors post their project requirements and let freelancers tender a bid to win the work. The more competition there is the cheaper the project becomes giving the best deal for your project creators.

Projects are listed for freelancers to view and each listing contains a quick overview on what the project is about so the freelancer can quickly decide whether or not to send a proposal and quote.

All the freelancers are given a rating and feedback by the project creator after the project and based on this the top freelancers are listed. Project creators only want to use the best freelancers with the most positive feedback so it makes sense for the freelancers to put in extra effort to satisfy the client, which in turn gives them a good opinion of your site. Freelancers can get to the top of the list by winning more projects and getting positive reviews.

Unique to GetLancer is the option for your project creators to use geotargeting to select where they want to get freelancers from. Some businesses might want to work with local freelancers from New York while others are not concerned where the freelancer comes from. GetLancer makes filtering the freelancers a breeze with the easy to use search refining features.

The GetLancer admin area has been designed to be super smooth and ultra slick to make day to day administration jobs a pleasure to do. When you login you’ll get a snapshot of exactly what’s going on with your site, who’s signed up, how many projects are being posted and most importantly how much money are you making.

Speaking of making money, incase you are wondering how you make money from GetLancer there are several ways to generate an income. You can charge a fee for posting a project or you can take a commission from the final price of the project (so if someone pays $1,000 you can take a 5% cut) or you can do both. You are not restricted to how much you can charge as it’s entirely up to you.

GetLancer will be available to buy very soon so please keep an eye on our Facebook page or our Twitter account or in our newsletter because the news will be announced in these three places.

If you’ve got any thoughts or comments please let us know in the comments below or on our Facebook page!

Now, incase you are not aware of how GrubWithUs works, think of it as a fusion of group buying, speed dating and social networking.

The owner of the site (that would be you) arranges great deals with local restaurants and posts them on the site. The menu will usually be fixed before hand so people pay a fixed amount for the food. Members can then decide if they want to attend the dining event and pay for a ticket directly on your site.

In order to get people interested the first person that buys a ticket gets a discount on the regular price and then the price rises for every ticket that is sold, encouraging and rewarding people to get in early. Members that are not sure if they want to attend can wait to see who else is going but end up having to pay more than those already confirmed.

GroupWithUs - Social Dining Software

Social dining is a great way for your members to meet new and interesting people in their local area and is almost like speed dating except you don’t have to change partners every 2 minutes!

Agriya’s latest software, called GroupWithUs, lets you run your very own group dining website complete with social networking options and a built in affiliate program. Everything is arranged by city so your members from Atlanta will only see dining events that are taking place in Atlanta but they can also check out other cities if they want to.

The whole script is multi-lingual and can handle any currency type thanks to the automatic currency exchange that’s built in to the script. You can have your Paris dining events page all in French and your Barcelona dining events page in Spanish, GroupWithUs is truly the social dining script built for the world!

It’s ready to be demo’ed and test driven right now so head over to the grubwithus clone page now and fill out the form to get all the details!