Written by Yes Media, a part of CLEARLINK – Integrated Local Marketing, contracted with HumanXtensions to create a “Daily Deal” platform for their clients. With the growing trend of “daily deal” web sites and offering, Yes Media wanted to provide a solution specifically oriented towards it’s local market clients.
Yes Media already had an existing client tracking system with an extensive set of database tables, and so the solution created had to leverage many of the existing tables and then add it’s own tables to track the specific daily deal information. This use of existing data tables also included integration with the existing authentication and authorization system used by Yes Media employees.
HumanXtensions developed the Daily Deal Portal using a LAMP solution, with some Ajax work done using jQuery. The Yes Media team provided a set of mockups of the site, and HumanXtensions worked with their team to develop a work flow for the deal process. This work flow required that the Daily Deal portal supported several roles of users: admins, sales people, and customers. In addition, the sales people had to be able to schedule the deals in all of the regions across the country where Yes Media was offering their services.
The work flow consisted of the admins designating sales people and their associated regions. When a sales person logged in, they could review the deals they had already scheduled in each region, and create new deals while on the phone with a customer. The deal would consist of a specific day, the price, cost, description, images, and other pertinent details. Once a sales person felt that they had everything together, they could submit the deal for approval.
Administrators were in charge of the approval process, and when they log into the system, they are presented with the list of deals that need approval. The admin is able to review and edit all of the deal details to ensure they are complete, and then either send the deal back to the sales person for changes, or approve the deal for publishing.
HumanXtensions also created the nightly publishing system that integrated with the Yes Media templates to create a landing page that customers would be linked to. This page merged all of the deal data into the page, and then linked the customer to a e-commerce page for the actual purchase. The URLs that were created by this publishing system were used to track the source of the links, which were generated as unique identifiers for each user. The publishing system also generated the mass e-mails – each one containing the unique tracking links – that again merged the deal details with a custom e-mail template. Additional database tables tracked all of the mails generated, sent, clicked, and acted on. The system also handled the unique opt-out system for customers to remove themselves from the mailing lists.
