The CoupConnect blog

http://www.coupconnect.com

[coupconnectinc]

How to Sell your Groupon, LivingSocial, AmazonLocal deals?

We all know it happens. You see a great deal and soon you've used 1-click or 2-click or whatever-click they call it and are a proud owner of an amazing deal for that restaurant, massage, golf lessons etc. Life is good.

Couple of months later the expiry date is creeping up and you still haven't used that deal (and you only know this because you use that CoupConnect app that reminds you that the deal is about to expire) and that vacation you planned means you wont be able to use it. Now what..

We though we could help. Introducing the even more amazing CoupConnect app with an in-app marketplace to help you buy and sell deals. Here's how you do it. 

A deal can be sold in our marketplace if (you don't have to remember these rules, you only see the sell button if the deal can be sold).

is not expired

has not been used

has been in your account for some time

and you are the first owner of the deal (gifted deals cant be sold)

Click the sell button and the first time you're selling a deal we'll ask for your paypal account details so we can transfer the money to you when the deal sells. After that it's a single click to list the deal in the market, if you later decide that you no longer want to sell it, just click the cancel sale button and the deal will be removed from the marketplace. And we do charge a 10% fee if the deal sells.

Buying from the marketplace is as simple. Just go to the marketplace, and click on Buy Deal. If want to see more details on the deal just touch anywhere on the deal and you'll get the details of the original deal.

When you click buy you'll see the details of what you're buying and a PayPal button. Click it, enter your PayPal details on the popup, click pay and you're all done. If you payment goes through the deal will immediately transfer to your account.

So now whenever you need a deal make sure you look in our marketplace, maybe you missed it when it was live but now someone might be selling it in our marketplace. 

Or if you're traveling to a new place, you can check our marketplace for deals no longer available from Groupon or LivingSocial or AmazonLocal. 

And we love referrals. Be sure to show your friends our app!

You can get the CoupConnect app from the itunes appstore at  

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/coupconnect/id650476130?mt=8

[coupconnectinc]

Wondering what to do with those expired deals?

So we were wondering what we could do about all the deals that already expired. If it was a Groupon, you could always try calling them for refund, yes they do that, but who knows how long you'll be on the phone with them. For LivingSocial and AmazonLocal I think you're just stuck with using the coupon for it's facevalue (if you paid $15 for a coupon worth $30, the facevalue is $15).

Or how about this, you probably have friends (we hope). They probably have birthdays or other occasions when you would like them to feel special by getting them a gift. How about getting that expired coupon working again by giving it as a gift to a friend? Yes now you can. We built it for you. As long as your friend has an email address you can gift your expired deal to them, even if they don't have an account with CoupConnect.

Just go your account on our website, if we think a deal can be gifted (if it hasn't been redeemed) then it will have a gift button on it which let's you gift the deal to a friend.

 Click on the "Gift to a friend" button and you'll be asked for their email address. 

Put in their email address and your gift will be on it's way to their account. We'll send them an email telling them what  you sent as a gift.

Next you'll see the deal page confirming that your gift is on it's way. You will also see a link to post to your friend's wall that you sent them something and also wish them Happy Birthday or Happy Anniversary etc. 

If your friend is already on CoupConnect and uses their facebook account then we will figure that out and select them, if it's someone that's not on CoupConnect then you'll be able to select from your friends list before posting.

And you'll be able to completely customize what you say in the post. 

When you click post you get the standard facebook box to write your message.

And here's what shows up on our friends wall

If your friend is not on CoupConnect they'll get an invitation to join and your gift will only transfer after they join, and we'll email you when your gift transfers.

And again this in the website now and coming soon to our app. 

And that's it for this edition. We're busy getting all this functionality in our iphone app. 

[coupconnectinc]

And a Marketplace is born..

Over the last couple of weeks we have released series of updates to coupconnect . These are coming soon to our iphone app as well.

Here are the highlights

Marketplace - Remember all those expired vouchers, what if you could have sold them? This is the biggest enhancement, you can now sell and buy vouchers on coupconnect.

When you add a provider (groupon, livingsocial etc) all your vouchers for each deal you purchased are synced with coupconnect (active, expired, redeemed)

Adding new providers (Groupon, LivingSocial etc) is much faster.

You can now view/print your vouchers on website.

And a few little things that we did to make things nicer.

Now let's take a look at how the marketplace works. When you take a look at your deals you'll find that some of them will have a sell button on them. This only happens for deals that have not yet expired and you've owned then at-least for a month (we might change this in future but it's a month for now, if you want to know why it's helps with fraud prevention).

When you click sell, we ask you for your paypal account details so we can transfer the money when your deal sells. If you've already provided this info then the deal is immediately listed in the marketplace.

Now you can help sell this by getting the word out about this deal, It's most likely that your friends like similar deals so go back to "My deals" and Post on Facebook (Feel free to tweet, and post on any other social networks but we built in support for facebook for starters).

And here's what gets posted on your profile, you can obviously customize the text but if someone clicks on this it takes them directly to the marketplace where they can add it their cart.

And now we move on to the purchase step. A click on that story will take them here..

Ok, so then they add it to their cart..

What's that fine print??? That just us telling the purchaser that they will have two transactions showing up in their account, one where they give money to CoupConnect and the other to the seller. They are still purchasing at the facevalue but the transaction is split right up front to pay the listing fees to CoupConnect. If you're wondering, the listing fees are 10% for CoupConnect at this time.

And both CoupConnect and the seller pay the paypal transaction fees, you'll see these in the emails sent by paypal.

But we digress and the user can complete the purchase using paypal and they will see the coupon transferred to their account and the money transferred to the seller and coupconnect.

Here's what the email to the seller looks like:

And this is what is sent the the buyer

And here is the paypal email for the transaction to the seller.

And there you have it, the magic of the CoupConnect marketplace demystified. What we're trying to do is make it possible for people to buy deals worry free and not waste them when they're unable to use them. And there's a lot more in store that we're furiously working on, besides these features making it to the iphone app.

So checkout the marketplace, watch this space, tell your friends, and keep using CoupConnect.

[coupconnectinc]

CoupConnect - What's in a name? 

So how did I go about finding a name for  the site. First we wrote down the basic idea. There's couple of things here 

We let people store all their coupons in one place

We remind them before they expire

We let them sell these coupons securely to other people using our marketplace

We let them gift the coupons to their friends

This basic idea led to other really powerful use cases. Once there is a marketplace (I know it's coming) someone travelling to Seattle from Los Angeles (or some other location) could buy an expiring deal from someone unable to use it. And herein lies the idea for the name, we just connected two people who could help each other out.

Now If you extend the idea even further to doing this in real-time (also coming soon) where let's say someone checks in (using FourSquare, Facebook etc.) to a restaurant and another person using our service has an expiring coupons. We can connect these two people in real-time.

And  we needed to find a catchy name and also an available domain name. Here's some names we came up with  - 

Coupexchangne  - taken

Coupnow - taken 

Deal now  - taken

Dealmenow - taken

Coupsocial - taken

Coupsmart - taken

Coupconnect - available

Coupget - available

Coup - taken

Couper - taken

getcoupnow - available

instagetcoup -available

instacoupit - available

spinforadeal - available

dosdeal - available

coupdost - available

coupdostres - available

coupdos - taken

Zippy coup

Jiffy coup

And yes some of those are just odd, but you're allowed to have some fun while picking names. 

But in the end CoupConnect just made sense in terms of expressing the idea simply, especially once we got over the Chicken coop imagery :-).

PS. (I also had to get over the fact that I wouldnt be able to sing it as well as coup dos tres.. And now it's probably stuck in your head too ;-) )

And isn't that a nice looking chicken coop picture, It's from Whidbey Island, WA.

[coupconnectinc]

It begins!

We needed a blog and now we have one! 

We'll talk about how we built things, what's going on in deals, and what new things we're upto to make thing easy for you.

We've spent a couple of months building a beautiful iPhone app for bringing all your deals together and here is a preview video we made for our techstars application but it turned out that time flew too quickly and we handsomely exceeded the 1 minute limit.. 

There is no such limit on our blog :-).