FANCY SHOPPE

Wow! I feel glad to say that I have planned for and successfully implemented few updates in presentation layer of fancy-shoppe.
It relates to grouping. Those of you already familiar with little bit of MySQL may understand difficulties faced by us, poor programmers, to combine a complex query with group by and order by clause. The problem was known and solutions never deterministic, yah! I mean it.

I am stating the problem below.

Each day I get news alerts from over hundred stores on ongoing deals available in the respective stores. Now when I add qualified deals from a particular store, it really looks odd to see the home page/ coupons page/ deals page get flooded with the deals from the same store. I realized that a grouping was very much essential to tackle this issue.

Now when I grouped deals by stores, the default MySQL Engine did all the hard work to pull one deal per store as was expected but it did not include fresh deals. It rather selected the oldest deal from that store!

Therefore, I need to tweak with 'having' clause to display the latest deal from the merchant. Obviously I have excluded all the expired deals from being displayed under major site sections. Finally the output is, if not 100% perfect but still workable.

For integrity I have also made a change in submission form. Now members can add deals only under the bottom-most category of respective category tree. I think this is also fair enough and this will ensure maximum exposure in respect of each deals.

Do not get upset, even I have missed a lot!

An appeal for our members! Please do not get upset to see the deals you have submitted is no more listed under major site sections. It must have been expired meanwhile, or someone else must have submitted a fresh deal under the same category from the same store. It all happens due to grouping by stores and exclusion of expired deals from major site sections. Good news is that now our clients will only get to see fresh live deals under major site sections. This will encourage them to re-visit our website more frequently. ( Return visits stats is also on the rise! Good News for us! Is not that?)

Even BOTS!

I have heard a lot about it before. As a website grows in popularity BOTs try to eat up the lion share of its bandwidth. I do not know the motives of those BOTS but they were rating items as hot/cold blindly. So, I have changed the ratings algorithm as well. Now only registered members can rate/review items/stores. I feel sad to do that. But there was little I could have done at this stage.

And More stores!

I also feel glad to get approval from stores like:
LEGO
1800Contacts
1-800-PetMeds

PLUS over fifty more stores. I'll include deals from those stores as well gradually. Meanwhile if you find a great deal, please suggest it immediately. I like to spend more time in optimizing your deals than my own.

Secret WORD!

Deals suggested by our members are also finding good ranks in search engines. So, do not hesitate to unwrap the best deals from your envelop. I'll try to find a place for your deals in search engines ( No guarantee!). If you are a store owner and want to allow some discounts for our clients, that will be my TWO CENT. Yes! I am also in a process of negotiating with the merchants to allow special discount for our clients. Won't it be nice?

Last Word!

Whenever I am out from my blog for few consecutive days, I invariably occupy the developers table to help you find the lowest price deals within a flash of a second, and you know it demands thorough analysis of web traffic trend and making necessary modifications in business rules. Therefore, I can not guarantee a daily updates in my blog. But that is not the case with fancy-shoppe as our members are pretty active even during weekends, and therefore, you will always find fresh deals there.

Before Closing!

Before closing today's rather long post, I would like to share with you this Chinese dress- 7% off offer to change our mood a little bit. If you do not have a purchase plan right now, still I would request you to explore the store. They have wonderful collections.

Bye then. Take care.

This printer is on Sale. If you need a versatile printer for your home office which can print color documents, photos, spreadsheet, and at the same time fax, copy and scan - then this must be the one you are looking for. Follow this link to know more about this deal.

First of all, I would like to welcome one of our most active members Pamela for returning back to fancy-shoppe.com after quite sometime. New deals suggested by Pamela will definitely help our friends to save more money on purchase of calenders and pet supplies. For calenders, the offer looks lucrative - FREE Shipping plus 40% off on orders over $20. Presently these deals are listed against everything else. I have not added any new category for these product lines though. If I get few more stores, and frequent suggestions, I'll definitely dedicate separate categories.

I'm personally interested to find few more handbag deals and I think this FREE shipping offer is not bad considering the money you pay to purchase this bag. Also by the end of March 31, 2008 - one more great deal will expire. It is Epson Inkjet Printer PLUS Digital Camera for $12.99 Only. Listed nearly a month's back, this deal looks great for small/medium sized home offices.
Hopefully, you will find these deals useful.

Hello, it takes sometime to update our available deals database. Anyway, I've finished adding new deals just now. Our DVDs page now looks better with inclusion of deals on Popular Warner DVDs
and more.

Besides, I've picked up few cheap but chic bags which will help you to find a replacement for your existing ones, if you want it to be replaced at any time as these bags will not hit your pocket that much hard.

We are updating deals on handbags/backpacks. Prices of items like handbags differ a lot from one store to the other, and at times it looks very confusing. Matter of fact is that for finding lowest price deals on products like electronic gadgets, or computer accessories are more easier as you can get a solid base to compare prices, i.e., model no, make etc. But things are not so easy for items like handbags. Yesterday, when I was conducting a survey (it really takes hours) on these products, some great deals drew my attention at Amazon. But one of the reviewers suggested that the item is available for $10.00 less in another store. So, I discarded the idea of listing that deal here. However, this bag available at Amazon seems to be a better deal. If you find a store offering lower prices, please let me know. It will be included at fancy-shoppe during its next update.

Again a very engaging weekend, as I was heavily involved in designing our first edition of newsletter. As we do not have many opt-in subscribers as of today, so, I have decided to circulate it among our members, and my intimate friends for their feedbacks. I have ensured anybody can easily unsubscribe from this service at any point of time without our intervention. Thus, getting in and out from this FREE service is really simple. I would, therefore, request you to subscribe to our FREE newsletter service, and if you feel uncomfortable, it will hardly take less than ten seconds to unsubscribe. If somebody does a cross-check on this subscribe/unsubscribe feature, and let me know if there is any difficulty, it will be of great help for me. I must say that I have no intention to sell, or spam your most esteemed mailbox.

Regarding the content of this newsletter, I have planned to share informative articles on money saving tips! I spend most of my time online reading such articles, and fact is that fancy-shoppe is inspired by that spirit as a whole. We are committed to save your money. Besides, I'll share some quick links to live deals. For our members, again I'll request you to suggest deals for inclusion in our newsletter services.

Presently, I have decided to circulate it weekly, and I'll review the impact of our entire newsletter service within a month.

Regarding deals/ suggested deals, I would once again request our honorable members to please follow our submission rules, and guidelines as it relates to integrity of Fancy-Shoppe. I really feel very bad when I need to discard any submission request for not following our guideline. Here the rule of thumb is that - 'Suggest a deal that worth!' and links must lead to the online stores offering the deals direct. I think for any website, it needs to develop a relationship of 'Faith and Love' with the end users for its sustainability, and integrity has been the most important issue in this regard. So, hopefully, I'll get full support both from our visitors, and members.

And finally take a look at this Faith and Love Silver Monogram Children's Bracelet. Does not it look meaningful in today's context?

Explore our collections of deals on Men's Jewelry.
Presently I've picked up some of the best deals available from renowned stores, and hopefully our members will suggest more.

Our server statistics showed that we had few searches for Men's necklace and pendants. Matter of fact is that I did not have much time left today to search for some of the greatest deals on these items. Actually, I planned to update Amazon.com coupons . You will find lots of savings in your this month's groceries bills, if you spend sometime to pick up the items that you need to buy using the coupons available at Amazon.com. However, regarding Necklace, I think this one will go great with v-neck t-shirt. The other one I found great is simply because of the price - it is available at a throw-away price. I'm leaving this section rather in a half-finished stage, as I would like to conduct a more thorough survey. When I'll return, I'll show you lots of necklaces for Men's. Till then, bye.

Hello! Back after some days of interval. Actually spent some time in developing an interface that will help both visitors to find deals quickly, and our members to suggest deals faster. I have made few changes in the way deals were displayed against categories (558 till date), the submit deal form now does lots of post-submission-scrutiny including checking for dead links, or valid images etc. This will definitely help us to make approval processes faster. After all good deals expire so soon, so we just can't afford to waste too much time in approving deals.

Beside these coding jargons, I spent some time to edit CSS as well, now the gray-border surrounding the images are no more. It now looks, I think better.

I have also plan to add new features to our newsletter services. I am not in any kind of hurry, as a coder I believe, it really takes time to develop something useful.

Meanwhile, I have got few deals for those of you, who love puppets. Two offers are currently on - 1) 10% discount storewide , and 2) FREE Shipping at Puppet.com

Please visit FANCY-SHOPPE , and continue suggesting deals.