#coupconnect

[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 :-).