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.