The buzz on the internet lately is the group purchasing dynamic. The concept usually consists of offering services at a discounted rate, where the deal is only met if a total number of users have “purchased” the offer. With names such as Groupon and Living Social clients and opportunist alike are jumping on the chance to cash in.
The concept of these group purchasing sites is no different than your standard e-commerce model with the exception of a virtual “tipping point” which, in theory, encourages group buying.
As previously stated: the concept of Groupon or Living Social is no different than a standard e-commerce model with a different in user interface to create a more personalized feel for those who use their site. Before we begin with the modules needed a user interface to promote daily deals is ideal for having an effective daily deal, group purchasing site.
Having an e-commerce model in mind we should look into a few modules to build the product/deals page. The Ubercart module, for Drupal, is our product and payment gateway other modules that can assist for our product page would be: CCK, Date, Filefield.
Lets look at Living Social to see how they construct their product page:
We will by-pass the search bar and side bars.
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We have an image and a slideshow. For this we can uses Views slideshow with Views as its dependency.
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Title with secondary information. We could add the secondary info with CCK by adding a “secondary info” field to our product content type.
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Our product description. Already included when using Ubercart
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Details of our offer. This can be executed with CCK by creating an extra field similar to our secondary information.
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Our price. The price feature is already included in the Ubercart (our payment module).
Savings. Can be calculated manually or programmatically using the original price and discounted price.
Quantity sold. Could be done using views and its grouping option
Days remaining. Can be done with the date and scheduler module. For a more robust system the rules module can come in handy.
The Rules module helps put together a systematic workflow, the power and functionality of Rules far exceeds the purpose of this article but from a group purchasing strategy, sending out customized emails, system messages, and executing a start and ending date for an offer can all be done using using rules.
A list of useful modules would be:
Ubercart
CCK (drupal 6 only)
Views
Views Slideshow
Date
Filefield (drupal 6 only)
Rules
Scheduler
Poormanscron (drupal 6 only)
The above modules listed with Drupal 6 versions can be found in Drupal 7 core.
Live Drupal Examples:
http://www.localiter.com/austin/
http://deal.com.sg/deals/singapore