Just like in 2010, 2011 was all about daily deals and group buying with our market leading GroupDeal software continuing to be the number one choice for businesses to build a daily deals website. This is reflected in our selection of client websites below which is dominated by customized and highly successful websites that were launched in 2011.

Big Deal

When Big Deal decided they needed to launch a group buying website in Thailand there was only one logical solution for their demanding requirements. GroupDeal has been given a complete design makeover with beautiful attention to detail. See for yourself, Big Deal are selling dozens of coupons for every deal they run.

Y-Deal

When you are from a country like Switzerland, a melting pot of 4 different languages, you need a website that is multi-lingual to cater to all audiences. Fortunately for Y-Deal they found GroupDeal, the only truly multi-lingual group buying software available that can handle multiple languages on one site and multiple currencies. A quick glance at their recent deals shows that being multi-lingual really pays off with dozens of coupons being sold on all deals.

The Daily Hookup

With a grungy design, The Daily Hookup website has been developed with exclusivity, environment and fashion in mind. The deals are not a hodgepodge of spa and beauty treatments but are crafted by their curators who secure deals that they would want to buy themselves. Due to the national nature of the website the software has even been integrated with a content delivery network for speed and optimization.

Deal LX

Deal LX is a large European company with business operations in over 12 countries that covers a large range of currencies, cultures and languages. They had some of the most demanding requirements we’ve seen because they wanted to quickly launch group buying websites in 15 countries. After extensive research they chose GroupDeal because of the easy customization options, excellent technical support and the simplicity of integrating new payment options. Deal LX offer dozens of deals every day across their vast network of GroupDeal powered websites and are now selling thousands of coupons on most of their deals.

Spurr

Australian based group buying website, Spurr, have taken Agriya’s GroupDeal software and customized it almost beyond recognition. With a fantastic blue and gray design it’s one of the best looking daily deal websites we’ve seen (and we’ve seen a lot!). Spurr are offering new deals every day and past performance shows they are selling dozens of coupons every day with everything from deep sea fishing to iPhone battery cases on offer. Their most popular deal has sold a little over 1,000 coupons which in reality is barely even starting to use the full power and capacity of GroupDeal.

Deal d’un Jour

Roughly translated as Deal of the Day, Deal d’un Jour is a Morocco based daily deals website chose GroupDeal because it offered easy backend translation in to the local language (French) along with integration with a local payment provider. The front end of the site has been completely customized with a fantastic blue theme and looks unrecognizable from GroupDeal’s default layout. They are now offering deals in over 25 cities throughout Morocco and have so far successfully run over 600 different deals with dozens of coupons purchased on each one.

City Setter

City Setter is a Spanish based daily deals website powered by Agriya’s GroupDeal software and completely transformed on the front end thanks to a brand new design and layout. City Setter have received a lot of attention from the Spanish media with mentions in some of the biggest national news websites (which you can read if you speak Spanish!). The entire website has been translated in to Spanish and the website now sells hundreds of coupons on each deal.

Charitable Coupons

By combining the population’s love for daily deals and the needs of charities to get donations, Charitable Coupons have hit upon a winning formula where customers can get great deals and donate to charity at the same time. With a completely new look and feel, GroupDeal has been solid as a rock as dozens and sometimes hundreds of coupons are purchased for every deal that they run. With a focus on Kansas City, Charitable Coupons hope they can expand their unique business model to other cities in 2012.

Kingdom Deal

Singapore is buzzing with group buying and daily deals websites at the moment and Kingdom Deal needed a rock solid service provider to ensure that when their website went live they would have the reliability and security to compete with some very well funded businesses. Fortunately this is what GroupDeal has been designed for and Kingdom Deal is successfully offering new deals every day on mostly accessories and other products. Most deals have sold more than 10 coupons with some even selling dozens.

Bungalow Stays

http://www.bungalowstays.com/

Renting out your spare room or couch is becoming an increasingly common way to earn a little bit of extra cash and our Burrow software is the perfect product to create a website like Airbnb. However it also works beautifully for mainstream vacation rentals websites and Bungalow Stays have taken advantage of this with their new website which lets people rent big villas and mansions around India for a night or even for months.

Mac Shnapp

Deals, deals, deals, hundreds of deals filling up your inbox – unless you’re in Germany and sign up to Mac Shnapp which eats up all the deals from German group buying websites and condenses it in to one easy to view email. This website relies on our Feedy software to aggregate deals and organize them on the website in an easy to use manner. Custom deal feeders had to be created and the new front end design looks nothing like the default Feedy theme. Since this is website is based in Germany, the company took advantage of the simple translation system to translate everything in to their native language.

Red Foto

With so much emphasis on daily deals and vacation rentals in the last couple of years it might be easy to forget that Agriya also has a wide range of other products. Red Foto uses Agriya’s Photoz software which lets anyone run a photo albums website a lot like Flickr or Picasa. This website has been highly customized with a unique design and has been translated completely in to Spanish.

These are just some of the exciting projects that Agriya has been working on in the last 12 months and with the number of projects in the pipeline we are confident that 2012 is going to be an even more successful year for our clients as businesses innovate to differentiate themselves from the crowd.

If you are an Agriya customer and you think we’ve missed out your customized website from this list please let us know in the comments below and we’ll make sure we’ll add your site and description right away!

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.

More and more people are approaching us and asking if we have a daily deals script instead of a Groupon clone and the answer is: of course!

Our GroupDeal software is already well known for its flexibility and adaptability but did you know it can be used as a daily deals platform out of the box? That’s right, no customization, not coding, no additional features, all you need to do is set the minimum purchases to zero and it’s ready to go as a daily deals script.

Some of the biggest daily deal sites are already using Agriya’s software and many of our clients have received some incredible press coverage from the biggest media houses around the world.

Take TipToken for example, built by London based entrepreneurs, they were interviewed by the BBC (probably one of the biggest media companies in the world) about their website and their future plans. Chris and Jamie (owners of TipToken) were able to leverage Agriya’s expertise in the group buying development market to create one of the leading deal sites for London. There is also a great interview posted with the owners on Youtube.

Another example is a US based deals site aimed at college students, we can’t name it publicly because they are working hard to secure venture capital funding based on the website built by Agriya, but we can tell you they were featured on the giant of the tech blog world, TechCrunch.

Next up is Jewpon, a website catering to…you guessed it, Jewish related deals! They have been mentioned in the New York Times (can you get more prestigious?), in online magazine Venture Beat and got a fantastic writeup in TheNextWeb, infact there are very few websites where Jewpon haven’t been mentioned! Incidentally you should take some time to check out the hilarious adverts they have created for their business.

Finally (but only because this will turn in to a mile long blog post if we mention all our client successes here) there is New York based ThePetDeal.com who were interviewed by the NYPost for their specialist website which focuses on deals for pet owners. Does it sound a bit far out? Then just go and check their sales stats! They have 3 or 4 deals each month to pamper the hell out of your little fluff ball.

OK, fine, we’ll give one more example of how successful our customers are because this one blew us away when we found out! BeeCrazy, a Hong Kong based group deals site regularly sells tens of thousands of deals each and every day, infact, DailyDealMedia recently mentioned they sold 100,000 coupons in one day. Wow! And they actually rely on a very old version of Agriya’s software to run their site, we’ve made thousands of tweaks and improvements since then so imagine how powerful our software is now!

If you’re noticing a theme here, these hugely successful websites are not just using Agriya’s GroupDeal software but they are focusing on niches and very local areas to run their sites. They are also run by people who are knowledgeable about the consumer market and have contacts that they can leverage but even that isn’t a barrier anymore thanks to a number of daily deal brokers which are springing up who will help provide you with daily deals so you just concentrate on promoting your website.

These are just 5 websites that are making it big with Agriya’s GroupDeal software and there are dozens more. If you want to get in touch with us to find out more, please fill out the form on our daily deals software page and a sales rep will get in touch with you. If you’re convinced that GroupDeal is the best daily deals script on the market then you can go ahead and make your purchase and buy our daily deals software today.

In our second client interview we approached Colin Fitzpatrick (aka Colly Fitz) and fired a million questions at him until he could take it no more. Colin is a new generation web entrepreneur however he can sometimes be found loitering around the conference rooms in Oracle’s headquarters in Dublin. He has recently released QuidsIn, a new fixed price jobs portal using our popular FP Platform software.

Quids In is a Fixed Price Jobs Portal For Ireland Using Agriya's FP Platform

We finally managed to track Colin down for a few minutes earlier this week and this is what he had to say…

About You

Hi Colin, thanks for agreeing to do this interview! Can we start with the introduction, tell us who you are, where in the world are you from and do you have a real life job?

Sure! Well I’m 30 years old and I live in Dublin. I have a full time job working for Oracle in an area called “Enterprise 2.0“– I’m a sales specialist so I advise organizations on buying large scale portals and content management software. I have always had a strong interest in social media and anything “Web 2.0″ – which is why I jumped on the “Fix Price Micro Marketplace” idea when I saw it as I just loved the concept.

How many hours do you spend on the Internet? Be honest! Are you the first person everyone calls when they have a problem with their computer?

Too many. I’m pretty much always connected. I’m online all day in work, and then I’m online most of the time when I’m at home too. It’s a sign of the times – being always online is slowly becoming the norm rather than being perceived as an Internet addiction.

Do you use Apple or Windows and why?

I use both but I prefer Windows. I do have a Macbook, and I used to have an iPhone – but I kind of have a love/hate relationship with Apple. I have massive respect for them as a company and they are marketing geniuses – but they still bug me with certain products and how they do things. I bought a Macbook because I do a bit of DJ’ing using a laptop, software and a controller. Mac’s are way better as they rarely crash and installing drivers etc for audio is easy compared to Windows. OSX Still bugs me though – I think they try to oversimplify things. For phones I’m a huge Android fan – I love its open nature and I believe that in not too long it will dominate the market.

Do you get the point of Twitter?

Of course. Twitter is a fantastic tool for consuming information and also spreading it if done right. I’m not a huge twitter contributor – I don’t tweet very much, mostly interesting links and articles I find online I will sometimes share, but mainly I’m a consumer. It’s a great way to follow certain people or brands that you want to keep up to date with. It’s all about quick moving information and Twitter seems to break news faster than any of the news agencies these days. I think the Facebook pages and Liking is better though. There are some really great examples of big and small brands interacting with their customers better using these tools – and that’s what it’s all about.

Have you ever customized your Facebook privacy settings?

Yes, I have, but really I’m pretty open about my online profile. A lot of people seem to wear ‘Tinfoil Hats‘ about online stuff which I think is a bit silly. You just have to be careful what you put online, period.

Have you ever ‘digged’ anything in your life?

Yes, I think Digg is a fantastic site actually. If you look at it every few days and just keep an eye on the popular stuff, you can be pretty sure that you’ll be exposed to most of the main things that are popular on the Internet – be it funny or interesting stories, or actual real game changing news. I once submitted a blog article that I had written to Digg, randomly a journalist from CNET saw it and wrote a piece about it on his tech blog, and linked to my site. I got thousands of visitors because of it!

Do you remember life before Google? Which search engine did you use?

I first got on the Internet in about 1996 – my search engines of choice were AltaVista and HotBot. Yahoo was a very useful directory, but once I discovered Google I have never looked back.

Do you think Yahoo will ever be a successful web company?

Yes – but there is no point in trying to compete with Google etc, their strengths are in other areas – they need to refocus. With their acquisitions of Delicious [Editor: Delicious has since been sold to the guys that started Youtube] and Flickr, its about Social and the wisdom of the crowd. Yahoo Answers is a great site that I think is underutilized.

Colin also blogs about technology, life and music

Is QuidsIn.ie your first website or do you run any other sites?

I’m no coder or proper designer but i have always enjoyed building websites, I have a couple of blogs and have had a few other sites in my past, and like to help other people out with getting online etc. I have a blog www.colinfitz.com which I occasionally write articles on.

About Your Website

QuidsIn.ie is targeting the Irish market and seems to be different to other fixed price job portals out there in that people are posting offline jobs like cooking, dog walking and even horse exercising, what gave you this idea?

There are dozens of “Fixed price Micro Marketplaces” already which mainly focus online and mostly around technology and Social Media. I wanted to do something different. Most people by now have probably heard about the horrific financial difficulty that Ireland as a country is in – 13.5% unemployment and hundreds of billions of Euros in Debt. With over 400,000 people unemployed in Ireland, very many of these have real world usable skills that they are no longer utilizing. QuidsIn.ie gives them the opportunity to offer up these skills as a marketable commodity to a wide audience for a low price – and hopefully get them back working again. Ireland is such a small place that it’s much easier to get actual real world offline jobs too. Doing a small job for a few quid now might just leads to something a lot bigger and more lucrative down the line. I’m very excited about being able to help people in this way.

Quids In offers unique real world gigs for people looking to earn a side income

Doesn’t ‘Quid‘ refer to British pounds but your site charges in Euros?

Strictly yes, but ‘Quid’ is just a slang word for “Money”. When choosing a name I wanted something catchy with positive connotations – “QuidsIn” is a well known phrase meaning “To come into money” so it seems the perfect choice!

Your site has been live for a short time but there are already hundreds of gigs listed, can you share some secrets as to how you have promoted your website?

Well I simply asked the people I knew to put on a few gigs for me, and then to post it in their Facebook status to tell others about it. Initially it was just the ones I knew but soon enough word spread and lots of gigs started getting posted from totally new people! I have a several staged strategy for the site and right now I’m doing some more work in the background before I start pushing it further. Facebook is going to be pretty important so I’m getting some work done on a custom facebook page: www.facebook.com/quidsin.ie which will be ready any day.

I’m sure you researched other fixed price job scripts before choosing Agriya, but what was the deciding factor for you to choose Agriya’s FP Platform?

I wanted the best one, simple. You have to do these things right from the beginning – no point in skimping on it and regretting it later. I evaluated 3 other platforms which I’m sure were great, but they were not as good as Agriya – especially in the back end. I noticed that many of the top FPP sites used the same script and this is no coincidence. Of next importance was support: I had been in email communication with a few companies and Agriya were definitely the best for customer service. Since I bought the product I have been very impressed with the post sales support too. Your team really has gone over and above my expectations to help me when I need support.

What do your friends and family think about your new website?

The response has been absolutely phenomenal. I had been telling people I was working on a new project, mentioning it on Facebook etc but not saying exactly what it was. When I initially launched it the response was incredibly positive and supportive – I really was amazed and humbled. I’m hoping to get the same reaction from the media when I launch it properly in a few weeks!

Do you have any new features planned for QuidsIn.ie?

Many – I have loads of ideas as to how to grow and develop the site, but I want to stick to the basics for now. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, I want to stick with the proven model – make that a success and only then start to develop further after that. Localisation is the obvious one so that people can advertise and find gigs in their local area.

Outsourcing & Agriya

How did Agriya catch your attention? Did you know anything about the company before you paid us? Who did you speak to when you first contacted us?

I was looking at a number of other vendors but someone recommended Agriya as the best. One other vendor looked great and they had a large repertoire of other technologies but they were not as focused. Agriya do a few things really well instead of trying to cover too many bases. Specialization is very important

What was your biggest fear about sending money to a company in India? What gave you the confidence to go through with the purchase?

I have done plenty of outsourcing jobs before, I could tell Agriya were very reputable so I had no fears of sending money across.

Have you ever outsourced a project before? How was that experience?

I have got work done on eLance etc. a few times and generally it’s very positive.

Can you give three pieces of advice to anyone looking to outsource a project to another company?

1. Detail your project properly – exactly what you need done and your expectations
2. Choose your winner wisely – cheapest is rarely the best one to choose.
3. Set clear objectives – process, outcome, turnaround time etc – also what happens if things go wrong.

Did you face any problems during your project with Agriya, and if so how were they dealt with?

I had a few small teething problems but all my issues I reported were fixed within a few days.

Do you have any future plans to outsource more work? Would you use Agriya again? Would you recommend Agriya to your best friend?

If I do further development on the site – I would be happy to work with Agriya again and I would of course recommend them to a friend.

End of interview.

Many thanks to Colin for taking the time to respond to all our interview questions. Check out Quids In for yourself and let any of your Irish friends know about a new way they can earn a side income at http://www.quidsin.ie. If you want to get more information about Colin’s website, also check out the Quids In Blog which gives details on how everyone can make a little extra money.

If you have any questions for Colin or thoughts on this interview, post them in the comments using the form at the bottom of this page. Colin has said that he’ll try and answer any questions when he has the time.

Incase you missed it, Agriya has interviewed another customer about his website:

http://blogs.agriya.com/agriya-interviews-sandip-sekhon-owner-of-websitemarketinghq

If you are an Agriya customer who has customized one of our products or have done a completely custom project and would like to get featured on our blog please let us know in the comments and we’ll be in touch with you!

Sending frequent email newsletters to customers is one of the best ways to maintain healthy relationships, promote your business, sell your products, updates your potential customers, and retain existing customers.

When developing an email news letter, it’s important to take good decisions. Purpose of the letter or who it is written for, etc. are some of the things that you need to give attention to, so that it will connect you with the right group of people (loyal clients) from all over the world.

Creating a newsletter is very successful and inexpensive way to maintain contact with your clients on a continuous basis. Here are some tips to make an ideal news letter:

• Review other professionals’ newsletters. You can simply look at quality newsletters on the internet, and that gives you the chance to get new ideas that include writing style, how to impress readers, and so on.

• Many websites offer free readymade newsletter templates. You can use them to prepare your own newsletters and save time.

• Know the purpose of your e- newsletter. New and informative content relevant to products/services should be the main feature of your news letter. It is better to keep your content as short as people don’t have enough time to read a long newsletter.

• Distributing newsletters are supposed to be scheduled on a regular basis. Whether you intend to send a weekly, monthly, or quarterly newsletter, you should keep your promises.

• People love receiving gifts – try to send some special offers for them on special occasions.

• Include high quality photos related to your products and services. It is sure to impress readers and help them know what your products are about.

Using a newsletter could be an effective internet marketing tool, if used correctly. It gives you the enough opportunity to maximize the effect of your marketing campaigns and start making money.