Agriya

Looking Back On 2011

2011 proved to be one of the most successful years in the history of Agriya. We know many companies make claims about having the best year ever but in our case we really mean it and have the success stories to back it up! We have added thousands of new customers over the last 12 months so we thought we’d start 2012 by taking a look back at where we’ve come from.

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.
 

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4 Steps To Success With Agriya’s Clone Scripts

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!
 

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5 Beautiful BuySell Templates

Agriya has a well deserved reputation for creating the best clone scripts on the market, but did you know that we also employ a team of highly skilled designers? Agriya pays top dollar for our talented designers because we know how much a good, clean and usable design can contribute to the success of a website and it’s something that no website owner should have to compromise on.

Today we want to take some time to showcase the stunning and beautiful templates dreamed up by some of our designers for our Etsy clone software, BuySell. This software lets you create a marketplace where you enable merchants to open mini-stores so they are taking care of the procuring, storage and shipping of all the products and you take a small fee as a commission on each sale.

Toys

This fantastic green styled template has a funky quirky feel to it with the unusually shaped title boxes and the header image. Although the designer had toys in mind when he created the design, the template is also generic enough to be used on a different niche.

More Info | Buy Now $750 (Made to order)

Fashion

We know what the designer had in mind when he created this template and BuySell would work beautifully as a e-Commerce site where budding fashion designers can sell their creations, but with it’s pastel colours and big rounded buttons this theme will also work well in many other niches.

More Info | Buy Now $750 (Made to order)

CD-DVD Store

If you are looking for a dark and trendy theme then this might be the one for you. BuySell is a great platform for your merchants to sell various media like DVD’s, CD’s and video games and this is probably the best looking theme you’ll find for that niche but it’s also generic enough to work in other niches like gadgets, tech and more.

More Info | Buy Now $500

Sports Cardinal

A beautifully clean design with nice red highlighting accentuates the important parts of the layout. This generic design would work for virtually any kind of niche from consumables to cars. With a bit of extra work, the red highlighting can be changed to a different colour or you could even allow the user to select the highlighting colour they want to choose.

More Info | Buy Now $750 (Made to order)

Cornflower Blue

This modern and contemporary design features fashionably large buttons and navigation menu options along with a clean body content for you to sell your products. The theme is generic but the cool blue hues would lend themselves perfectly to some handmade beauty products or maybe even a site for baby items.

More Info | Buy Now $750 (Made to order)

More Great BuySell Templates

There are over 15 more stunning BuySell templates available in our Agriya Store so head on over and check them out today. If you’ve got any questions, let us know in the comments and we’ll be happy to help.
 

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Making Money From Your Clone Script

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.

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Grab These Insane Discounts and Freebies Now

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.
 

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Doing So Much More With BuySell

We created BuySell to fulfill the market demand for a high quality, scalable and fully supported Etsy clone – something which it has truly excelled at given the customer feedback we’ve received but we don’t want you to think that it’s just and Etsy clone when under the hood BuySell is an extremely powerful ecommerce system that with a bit of tweaking and customization can be turned in to just about any kind of web store.

Real Estate

Get real estate agents listing their properties. With all the vendor features already built in, real estate agents can create an account and start uploading the properties in their portfolio. With a little bit of customization and Google Maps integration you can add some geo-targeting in to the script to let people find properties listed in precise areas. It doesn’t just have to be about selling property though, it would work equally well as a place to list properties for rent.

Used Cars

BuySell works on the principle that anyone can come along and set up a store on your site to sell their product, but why do they have to sell multiple products? Every day tens of thousands of individuals are looking to sell their car and with most of the functionality built in, BuySell could be the perfect platform to letting anyone list their car for sale and have buyers make the purchase online. With some customization and Google Maps integration you can even make it so that people can find used cars for sale near to where they live. You can also take this concept further and do a site for different things like used bikes, used boats, used power tools etc.

Local Yard Sales

We all know eBay is the granddaddy of yard sales but BuySell would be an equally effective site for people to sell their unwanted goods. With vendor signup such a breeze, anyone with unwanted items can quickly list what they have for sale and sell it for a fixed price rather than hang around in an auction style associated with eBay.

Writers Publishing Platform

How many unsigned publishers are there in the world? We’re willing to bet that there are millions who would kill for the chance to get some recognition and with BuySell you could give them that opportunity. Authors can sign up using the vendors platform and start adding their ebooks to your site. Since BuySell allows you to sell digital downloads you have virtually everything you need to let authors set up a store front and start self publishing. With some customization you can let the authors customize their store fronts and enable them to really promote their writing.

Stock Photography

Similar to the writers publishing platform, stock photography lets people sell their images to graphic designers and websites. Anyone with a camera can create a vendor account and start uploading their images and with a bit of customization you can insert watermarks on the photos to make sure they don’t get stolen.

Charitable Website

Many people often donate high quality products and items to charity shops where no one ever sees them because too few people venture in to a charity shop. You can change this by setting up a store specifically for local charities to sell their donated items. Each charity can create its own store and add all the products it wants to sell. The benefit is that you can create a web store full of cheap, used items while the charity can increase its revenue thanks to more people buying their products.

These are six unique and out of the box ways that Agriya can think of to use our BuySell software and prove that it’s not just an Etsy clone (although it remains the best and only Etsy clone script on the market). What ideas can you come up with to use BuySell?
&nbps;

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GroupDeal 2.0 – A Quantum Leap For Daily Deal Scripts

Careful observers of Agriya’s product releases may have noticed a slow down recently in the number of new updates for our Groupon clone software, GroupDeal. That doesn’t mean that we’re assigning resources to other projects, far from it, demand for GroupDeal and the daily deals industry has been as strong as ever but we wanted to take some time to really improve our product in the market and make it not just the best choice but the only logical choice to run your daily deals or group buying website.

Agriya is already the number one provider of daily deal software and as the map below demonstrates we’ve sold GroupDeal to customers around the world and in every single major market.

With over 600 minor bug fixes, changes, loads of feature additions, dramatic speed optimization as well as a complete overhaul in the admin user interface, we’re calling this release GroupDeal 2.0 and once you see it for yourself you’ll wonder how you can run a daily deals site with anything less. The developers themselves are so proud of it that in a recent developer blog post they mentioned that they did an all nighter just to get the product released to the testing team on time!

Built For The Enterprise

The biggest change to GroupDeal 2.0 though is that it is built for the enterprise daily deal website, the large site that has multiple deals spanning multiple locations. In its S-1 SEC filing, Groupon alluded to the fact that it makes its money based on data mining and this is a concept we have introduced in GroupDeal 2.0 – the admin and merchant area is jam packed with data and statistics to ensure you are getting the most out of the deals that you are offering.

Demographics

The demographics charts of GroupDeal 2.0 have been improved so you know exactly the type of person who uses your site so you can approach merchants to create deals to appeal to this specific group. The new interface gives you all the information you need at a quick glance to know who your market is and which demographics are actually buying your deals.

Price Point Data

Demographics can only tell you so much though, using historical data from past purchases you will now know exactly what price points give you the most profit per deal so that you can create future deals around this price point. Of course, never stop testing and all the purchase data is fed in to an array of charts and graphs so you can see and compare how prices affects your profitability.

Coupon Usage Information

One of the key areas of profitability for the merchant is how many people actually use the coupon. We have all been there and bought a great deal and then never got around to using it before it expired. According to Yipit, they reckon that the number of coupons that goes unredeemed is around 10-20% per deal so you can use this as a selling point to the merchants you recruit.

Live Deal Status

Instantly see the status of all the deals currently running on your website in a quick graphical snapshot. You’ll see all the deals that are currently saved as a draft, those that are upcoming, open and live deals, deals that have recently closed and older expired deals.

Content Delivery Network Integration

When you are running an enterprise site you need your visitors to be able to access it quickly from anywhere which is where a content delivery network (CDN) comes in. GroupDeal has been setup to allow you to utilize a CDN to dramatically speed up your website where ever the visitor comes from. GroupDeal 2.0 works with all the major CDN’s on the market.

iPhone Apps Integration

Now you can find out how many people are using your GroupDeal iPhone app and even send them messages directly to their phone using our unique Push technology. When you purchase the GroupDeal iPhone apps we will connect it to your GroupDeal website and you’ll find out exactly who is using your apps and what iPhone version they are using.

More Powerful Affiliate Program

From the feedback we’ve been getting from our GroupDeal customers from around the world and we know that most of you are in love with the built in affiliate program. Most enterprise daily deal sites are looking for that competitive marketing advantage which is what the affiliate program provides so we have spent a lot of time improving and expanding the features and data reporting that you get from the built in program to make it a world class.

Massive Performance Gains

We made GroupDeal 1.0 to be as fast as possible but GroupDeal puts the afterburners on the core engine and page loads are now 28% quicker thanks to the optimized Javascript, image sprites, condensed CSS and improved mySQL queries (we’re hitting the database much less now).

A Quantum Leap Forward

GroupDeal 2.0 is a quantum leap forward for daily deal scripts and offers all the features a serious enterprise company will need to run a national or global group buying website. We’ve always marketed GroupDeal as a Groupon clone because when we built the first version of the software 2 years ago that’s what it was, but with all the new features and fantastic new interface we think it won’t be long until Groupon becomes a GroupDeal 2.0 clone!

GroupDeal 2.0 and GroupDeal Lite

This new release will sell for our standard price of $1,000 which is a steal given the amount of time and effort that has gone in to crafting this beautiful software. However, we also appreciate that many people don’t want to run an enterprise type operation and want to offer some deals just to their own local market so we have branched off the software to create GroupDeal Lite.

As the name implies GroupDeal Lite is a lighter version of GroupDeal 2.0 without all the reporting, stats, performance increases etc. It’s designed as a simple script to get you up and running quickly and without hassles. GroupDeal Lite is already a proven platform because it powers hundreds of live websites right now. Since this is the slimmed down version we are offering it at the rock bottom price of just $750.

Existing Customers

Agriya promised all customers that they would get lifetime updates and true to our word if you have purchased GroupDeal from us you will get free access to GroupDeal 2.0, however since there are so many core changes upgrading your script to the latest version is not straightforward for a non-developer. We include the patch files and instructions for you to make the upgrade though.

Clients who go on to purchase GroupDeal Lite will continue getting lifetime updates to the GroupDeal Lite software.

Why Choose Agriya

Agriya were the first company to enter the market with a group buying script which we marketed as a Groupon clone. We are based in Chennai which is a hotbed of talented programmers and designers which allows us to hand pick the best programmers in the country and provides a clear advantage over competitors from smaller cities who have to rely on a smaller job pool.
 

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How To Use Burrow’s Affiliate Program

An affiliate program is like crowdsourcing your marketing agency and you can get a lot of exposure for your business with virtually no up front costs when compared with something like PPC. An affiliate program also has the added advantage of only paying for performance so while you might be paying for visitors who take no action when you run a PPC campaign, an affiliate program means you only have to pay the commission when you have the money in your hand.

Think about this too: If your affiliates are doing the work to send you targeted traffic, you can let them worry about SEO and rankings, you’re getting all the targeted traffic you need and with so many affiliates talking about your website the chances are a media company might pick up on your story because it’s creating such a buzz on the ‘net.

Competing directly with well established websites like Airbnb, HomeAway and 9Flats is going to be a challenge when they have multi-million dollar advertising budgets but an affiliate program is the perfect solution to conduct a guerrilla marketing campaign to get exposure for your company.

Burrow comes with a feature packed affiliate program option which lets you manage your affiliates, set the commissions and handle all the payment requests. Even if a booking is refunded the system is intelligent enough to roll back any commission earned by the affiliate. But there is more to running an affiliate program than just enabling this feature on your script, it needs to be well managed and well thought out.

Plan Your Creatives

Just offering an affiliate program isn’t going to be a guarantee of success you have to remember that most people need to be led by the hand in simple small steps in order to do something. If you just say to the person, put this link on your website or blog very few people are going to actually do it, you need to sell your affiliate program as much as you are selling your website to new visitors.

The first thing to do is to create a variety of graphical advertising banners for your website which affiliates can simply copy and paste on to their website (it’s all about making their job as easy as possible). You need to create banners in multiple standard sizes as described by the IAB, a few variations in each size with different calls to action will suffice.

It’s not just the graphic banners you need to create though, you need to add no-work copy and paste text that your affiliates can add to their site. Consider preparing material for the following creatives:

• Review articles explaining how your website works
• Travel or tourist guides for the places where people are offering places to stay on your website
• AdWords ads your affiliates can copy and paste
• One sentence descriptions of your website
• Pre-formatted forum signatures
• Solo emails

In a nutshell, the easier you make it for your affiliates to copy and paste marketing messages to their website the more likely you are to get people promoting your website for you.

If you have the budget you can even consider some customization to the Burrow software to create an XML data feed that regularly updates with the latest places to stay and your affiliates can build whole websites showcasing these places on their website.

Set Up An Attractive Commission

If your affiliates have to spend their time and effort putting affiliate links on their site or even building entire websites based around promoting your site you need to make it worth their while. You can look at the Internet marketing arena here because often the best selling products are not selling more because they are the best in the market but because they offer their affiliates the best commissions.

Put yourself in the shoes of an affiliate who just wants to earn money on the Internet. Product A is the most comprehensive product ever produced on a particular subject but only pays out 5% commission on sales. Product B is an average product but pays affiliates 75% commission. The vast majority of people will promote the 75% commission one because for the same effort they earn exponentially more.

The same concept needs to apply to your affiliate program. Paying your affiliates $0.50 on every booking isn’t going to inspire anyone to get serious about promoting your site. Paying the affiliate $5 on every booking is going to be a much greater motivator.

Burrow gives you the flexibility to offer commissions on new users that are signed up as well as commissions on bookings. You can even use one and disable the other. If you decide to offer a signup commission then the amount can be quite low, this can be set between $0.10 and $1 per signup. To ensure that people don’t just get 10 of their friends and family to sign up to you can set the minimum payout amount to $100.

The commission on a booking can be either a percentage or a flat fee. Remember that you are taking a booking fee from the buyer and a small fee from the seller so your commission shouldn’t exceed this amount otherwise you’ll be running at a loss!

The image above shows some other important considerations. The cookie expiry period is how long the user should be tracked for, for example if your affiliate sends a visitor to your site but they don’t sign up straight away but instead come back the next day, do you still want your affiliate to get credited? If you set the cookie to just one day you probably won’t get any interest in your program, it should be set to at least 30 days.

Paying commission on every booking is an important consideration. If you check this option then you can feasibly pay a lower commission because the recurring income potential will be higher (and you can highlight this to your affiliates). However it does meant that in the long term you would earn less as you have to pay out commission on many future bookings so it might be an idea to have a high commission on the first booking and no future commissions. The decision should be led by the performance of your business, do you find that people just make the one booking or make many bookings over a lifetime.

The commission holding period is an important consideration because we live in a world of online fraud where credit card payments can be reversed so you don’t want to pay out your affiliate commissions until you are certain that the payment is legitimate. Holding a commission for 30-90 days is commonplace for affiliate programs.

Finally you have the threshold limit which is the minimum amount an affiliate must earn before they can request a withdrawal. Set it too low and you’ll be constantly processing payment requests, set it too high and affiliates will be demotivated. Try to set it so that an affiliate needs to get several bookings before they reach the threshold.

Spread The Word About Your Affiliate Program

Your regular users who book places to stay are not really your target audience to promote your website. They will do this by word of mouth rather than set up a dedicated website telling everyone how wonderful your service is. Instead you need to go to the places where hardcore, full time, super affiliates are hanging out. This means registering on affiliate forums and getting your website listed on affiliate directories – and this is where your effort of making awesome creatives and setting highly motivating commissions comes in to play. These full time super affiliates will review what you have got to offer, consider the ROI from a marketing spend and time point of view and decide whether it’s worth their effort to promote your site to get a slice of the travel industry pie.

If you are trying to split your time between promoting your site to buyers and promoting to affiliates then remember that if you signup one affiliate they have the potential to promote your site to hundreds of people that you might have otherwise reached and you only have to pay out when you have been paid upfront.

Respect Your Affiliates

Finally, if you want to make your affiliate program a success when using Agriya’s Burrow software make sure you respect your affiliates. This means making sure you pay them on time and every time, never delay the payments and don’t change the terms of your affiliate program for the worst without consultation.

Conclusion

The affiliate program built in to Burrow is a very powerful and very flexible solution to market your website but you can’t just enable the feature and hope that people just start promoting your site, it takes work and effort but the rewards can mean you have a crowdsourced army of marketers working to promote your site leaving you to do other things, like count all the dollars rolling in.
 

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Agriya Says “Ni Hao” To China!

China is one of the biggest markets in the world with its fast growing economy and unique form of capitalism, companies across the face of the Earth are fighting to get a presence established in this vast country. While we have many clients from Hong Kong and completed many different daily deal and group buying websites we’ve never worked on a major customization project with a mainland Chinese client until now.

Earlier this month, Agriya signed a contract with a Beijing based consumer company to provide backend support, maintenance and development consultation to their Chinese team of programmers. As part of the contract three Agriya employees had to travel to China’s capital city to formally sign the contract and start working directly with the China team. Two of our programmers will be working onsite in Beijing for the next two months and we’re thrilled that they are as excited about the project as we are and are certain that this will help increase the cultural understanding between India and China – almost certainly the world powers of the future.

One of the Agriyans has just returned from Beijing this week so we caught up with him to find out more about this country and the job Agriya will be doing there.

On Society Development

Aravind, the CTO of Agriya and the go to guy for anything technical, was extremely impressed with what he saw of China, which although confined to Beijing allowed him a unique insight in to this often mysterious culture. “In terms of infrastructure development, China are about 5 or 10 years ahead of India” Aravind said, “Beijing has a reputation of being massively crowded just like any Indian city but the thing that struck me was there weren’t as many people on the roads or outside, everyone seemed to be working indoors or in offices.”

On The Communication Barrier

It has been notoriously difficult to do business with China in the past because of the inherent language barrier. India has been able to capitalize on this because every university graduate is taught in English and English is the connecting language for the dozens of different languages spoken in India. You’ll often find groups of middle class Indian teenagers conversing in English in the coffee shop rather than their mother tongue. China on the other hand is only just beginning to implement English as a mandatory skill to be taught to students and one statistic we’ve seen says that there are more students learning English in China than there are English people speaking!

But how did this affect the communication between Agriya and the Chinese company? “Spoken English is a big problem for the Chinese” says Aravind, “beyond the basic words such as hi, thank you, please and hello they didn’t seem to be confident speaking the English they knew. I’m not too sure why this is because their written English is generally quite good and we have been able to converse through emails and instant messenger in the lead up to this trip.“. In order to overcome the language barrier, the Chinese company brought in translation experts to help facilitate the communication between the two sets of developers, in the end two local translators were hired along with a 3rd who was flown in from New York.

Did the introduction of translators help with the communication? Aravind reveals what it was like. “It wasn’t too difficult for us to communicate because we are all used to having translators in our own country; sometimes you need to buy something from someone who only speaks Hindi and I only speak Tamil and English so we need to get a translator involved. The same goes for the Chinese companies, they are so used to using translators for business it’s almost second nature for them now and the translation etiquette with the pauses is well honed. There were small issues because the translators need time to learn the technicalities of the project and programming in general but apart from that everyone seemed to be comfortable using translators and who knows, with Indians’ reputation of picking up new languages quickly we may have two fluent Mandarin speaking developers coming back to Chennai in a few months!”

On Chinese Programming

India and China both have different reputations for the things they are good at. India is often showcased as being a knowledge and brain center, a place to outsource business work and China is famous for its manufacturing industry which creates virtually every toy and product we buy nowadays. China is trying to establish itself as a knowledge center and we’ve seen a small increase in the number of Chinese BPO and IT companies, but what are their standards like?

Aravind tells us, “From the code that we reviewed which was produced by the Chinese programmers it was quite solid and well programmed but it used techniques and customs that we were using 4 or 5 years ago. They’ve got a good grasp of the basics but they struggled with the more advanced styles that we use in our software.” There are probably many reasons for this, Aravind revealed, most likely because “the advanced coding theory is usually published in English and it takes a while for it to be translated properly in to Mandarin, so India’s programmers are able to use the techniques immediately but Chinese programmers have to wait until it has been accurately translated to put the theory in to practice.”

On The Chinese Work Culture

Both India and China have a fierce reputation for producing hard workers that will work from morning to night and even through to the next morning if you demand it of them, but the Chinese work ethic even blew away Aravind, “I was amazed at how dedicated and sincere the workers were, we’ve always believed that we had hard workers at Agriya but China seems to take it to another level. When we arrived we urgently needed translators to start work on Monday and the Chinese HR lady was in her office all weekend on the phone trying to arrange a translator, that she could just leave it until Monday didn’t even cross her mind, I don’t know if she even went home on Saturday!“.

On The Chinese Cuisine

India has a well deserved reputation for being one of the culinary capitals of the world, simply put: you haven’t lived until you’ve tried real, authentic Indian food cooked in India by a housewife. Forget what you eat at your local Indian restaurant, real Indian food is far better. All three Agriyans were naturally apprehensive about the food they would get to eat in China since it’s so different to what they were used to and to make matters worse one of the team members is a strict vegetarian.

Aravind explains “We were all worried about the food options although the two programmers thought they would be OK because they are non-veg eaters but non-veg in China is mostly pork, beef or from some nameless animal and after the first culinary experiment they decided Chinese food wasn’t for them! Fortunately Beijing is a lot like any capital city anywhere and there are restaurants to suit every taste bud and just down the road from the office there is an Indian restaurant which even serves the famous South Indian dishes like Dosai and Idly!”

Closing Thoughts

This is not the first time Agriya has ever done some on-site work, infact we’re quite experienced with it now and have sent programmers to Canada, the Middle East and now to China. We understand that some customers want the cost savings of outsourcing to India but with the convenience of having programmers in the same office and we’re happy to work with anyone to get our programmers to your location for the duration of the project.

This new project in China is a milestone event for Agriya because it represents an entry in to the last major economy – something which very few other Indian IT companies have managed to achieve.

We wish the two Agriya programmers living onsite in Beijing the best of luck and we hope to be able to publish many more photos of Agriya’s first big project in China.

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Not Just An Airbnb Clone, Burrow Is Much More!

When we originally programmed Burrow it was to meet the rising demand from customers asking for an Airbnb clone or a website that was similar to Airbnb. After a lot of research we decided that the collaborative consumption market was set for tremendous growth as more people realized the benefits of sharing their possessions when they are not using it.

Now, Burrow is the foremost Airbnb clone script available on the market and our clients from all four corners of the globe are working to put the business infrastructure in place to launch their websites. Our buyers come from every single continent, mostly from North America but also many businesses in Eastern Europe are looking to set up their P2P subletting websites, companies in Brazil and Argentina are working hard to put up a site, Kenya and South Africa are also countries where our clients are building vacation rentals sites and of course South East Asia is seeing a boom in the number of subletting startups.

Since we released Burrow several months ago the collaborative consumption market has gone from strength to strength and new startups are launching each week that builds on the what’s mine is yours concept. Many people have even approached us and asked when or if we are going to release clone scripts like a loosecubes clone or a opendesks clone or a parkcira clone or a getaround clone. The answer is: we already have a clone of all of these scripts!

From the very beginning, Burrow has been designed as a collaborative consumption platform, it’s just that Airbnb was the most popular site at the time so we targeted that market to begin with. However the script is extremely flexible and can be used for any type of website where one person has something they can give and another person has something they need.

Burrow is the perfect script for any kind of website that needs to do the following:

• You need to connect a provider with a buyer
• You need to handle the payments and provide an escrow service
• You need to let people review and provide feedback
• You want to build a location based service

Here are just a few examples of brand new collaborative consumption niches which can easily be replicated using Agriya’s Burrow script.

Office Space

Very small startups and freelancers often don’t want to work from home or have the space to work from home but renting an entire office is just too much money and commitment. It might also be the case where two or more freelancers have to work together on a project and it’s just easier when you can have an office space for a few weeks to get the job done. LooseCubes and a number of other startups realized that there is a niche market for people looking to rent an office desk for a few days or a few weeks with no further commitment so it connects businesses who have excess office space with freelancers who can’t work from home.

Burrow is ideally suited to this type of business because it uses geo-locations to allow people to list the office space they have for rent in specific towns and cities and freelancers from these places can see all the office space available for rent. Burrow facilitates the booking and transactions and allows both parties to leave a review when the term ends.

Car Rentals

Forget Avis, Thrifty and Hertz, the new car rental kid on the block is..YOU! Or maybe your neighbour. The car rental industry is ripe for disruption because all across America (and most other countries in the world) there are cars sitting on the driveways or in garages depreciating and losing value each and every day. GetAround.com is a startup that aims to let people make money from their cars when they are not using them.

Collaborative consumption for car rentals is a perfect use for the Burrow software because people can list the car they have available and the location, the times it is available from (maybe they are going on vacation) and the hourly cost to rent it out. Burrow will facilitate the booking, the transaction and the exchange of information between the buyer and seller and also hold the escrow money. The review system ensures that the buyer can trust the seller and vice versa.

Car Parking

We’ve all been there, early in the morning you have to go to an interview or go to a client meeting and try as you might you can’t find anywhere to park except for one place 3 miles away that wants to charge you astronomical prices for a short 3 hour stay. And yet…there are so many people who go out to work in the morning and have an empty drive way or garage or who don’t even have a car but have a parking space reserved for them. ParkAtMyPlace.com connects people with parking space available for short term use with people who urgently need a parking space close to their destination.

Want to offer car parking services in your city? Then you’ll discover that Burrow already has all the features you need to create a car parking space website. People with parking spaces available can list them on the website along with the location, times they are available, the hourly or daily cost and how long it is available for. Burrow will connect people needing a parking space and handle the booking, transaction, escrow and review process.

Local Classes

Your skills are in demand and can make you money! Has anyone ever told you that you make the best cocktails? Are your lasagne dishes legendary? Do you make hand crafted greetings cards and the most beautifully wrapped gifts? What ever your skill it’s likely that there are people in your area that are willing to pay to learn from you which is where skillshare.com comes in and lets anyone post their classes or skills they want to share with others and allows people to book a one-on-one class or attend a group class.

Burrow would need a little bit of customization if you want to let people offer group classes, but for basic one-on-one classes Burrow has everything that your seller needs to list their class. They can set the times the class will be held, the dates, take photos of what is going to be taught and of course where the class will be held. People can come to the site and find out what classes are available in their local area. Burrow will handle the bookings, the transactions and hold the money until after the class has been completed in case of complaints. The review system ensures that buyers can see if they are going to get value for money by attending the class.

These are just some of the many ways in which you can use Burrow to create a collaborative consumption type website and there are many more ways being invented every single week. Recently we came across a website which lets you share your power tools with the local community and another website that lets you rent out your bicycle.

As many people look for new ways to recoup some of the money they spend on buying assets or possessions then we firmly believe that collaborative consumption is here to stay.

The developers of Burrow have made a very useful chart to show all the types of websites you can create by using Burrow. Most of the sites can be run ‘out of the box’ but some might require a small amount of customization to take in to account specific features. You can also check out another graphical chart created by Agriya’s developers about the Burrow possibilities.

Find out more about Burrow here.
 

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