Wahanda TechBlog

What a month! On Monday we launched our take on collective buying - Wahanda MobDeal.

This is an area of eRetail which is really picking up momentum in these cash-strapped times so we were obviously hoping we would get a good response. As usual our supply team have pulled together some amazing offers and combined with the immediacy of the 24-hour availability period it’s so far proved very compelling.

The premise is fairly simple, and in that respect is a take on a fairly old idea: Collective Purchasing Power. We negotiate an amazingly good deal with a supplier which is only available if we can deliver a minimum number of orders. It’s then put front and center on the site for just 24 hours. So everyone knows what the deal is for that today we send the details via email early in the morning (well early for us techies).

Combined with giving the user the ability to easily spread the word (Facebook, Twitter etc.) it creates a buzz that is truly astonishing.

Getting it built

So what have been the challenges with this from a Technical perspective?

In many ways this was quite a straightforward project. The goal was to best combine features we already have on the site, rather than re-invent any wheels. This made the project far more about the detail than a big engineering effort. We chose the christmas iteration to implement some new designs (more on that to follow) which also created a lot of attention to the little things.

Thanks to the use of electronic fulfillment (a printable voucher) we were able to cut down the booking process to a single page. We then had to implement differing handling based on whether we have reached the required minimum and build lots of different email templates for each variation. Chris did a great job adding the dynamic elements that make the product feel so vibrant. Countdown timers, dynamically updating sales counters and the like. We haven’t made the hourglass actually functional yet but we will.

ZQueue

A pretty crucial part of this process is the ability to only authorise payments up until the point the deal is on. If we don’t hit the minimum then no one pays anything. Up to this point we’ve always authed and completed in a single step so this proved to be quite a big change. Fortunately we were already on the way there with some of core technologies.

We’ve been slowly changing our architecture to make a lot more use of asynchronous message queues. Usually associated with enterprise class systems messaging based systems are a great, simple of way of clearly separating out parts of the architecture, and hence making the development split easier. So the lead developer on the main process was able to simply concern himself with the workflow and not the resulting offline actions like sending emails and processing payments.

Our queuing system was built in-house (it’s really very simple) and is totally persistent. All it consists of are a bunch of stored procedures in SQL Server which deal with doling out items to process or adding items to defined queue. There are some additional maintenance jobs that run to ensure nothing ever gets missed, as well as ensuring the indexes on the queue are usable.

In addition we have some features which break the FIFO rules, allowing prioritization of items and automatic failure mgt. (with re-queuing) if a downstream process is unable to deal with an item successfully. This makes it a great way to see what’s going on at any one time but watching the flow of data across the queue.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy MobDeals. There’s lots more very cool stuff in the pipeline so watch this space!

The last few release have been very much focused on delivering a major new piece of functionality, namely the ability of any supplier working with us to log into the site and update their details, add and edit products and generally manage their site presence.

This is such a big thing in and of itself I’m going to write a separate blog entry introducing this new application. As such this post is just a quick update of some of the smaller things we’ve added over the last few weeks.

Leads Improvements

Leads generation (offer products) has been really growing in popularity over the last couple of months. As we find out more from you (our suppliers and customers) about what works and doesn’t work we’ve been incrementally adding features.

Date / Time Capture
If you have an offer which is very time dependent (e.g. a free session) then you can now specify that you require this info on the product. When we see this option we add a new field to the leads form and make it required.

Multiple Venues for an offer
If you have an offer which is applicable at multiple venues (also good for free sessions) we know automagically include a selection field and ask the customer to tell you which venue they are interested in visiting.

Confirmation of Leads
This is a feature to try and help track our leads a bit easier. Similar to how we track the fulfillment of vouchers we now ask you to confirm when you’ve received a lead. This means we can assure our customers that their requests are being dealt with.
We’re going to add these to the venue management tool soon so you can keep an easy track of the leads you’ve received (if you’re a supplier).

Therapist Gender Filter

When you’re doing searches for therapists you can now add a filter to the results to limit the therapists to a specific gender.

The last month has been a bit of a slog for the development team here at Wahanda. If you’re been following you will have noticed the gap in release posts is longer than one would expect from a team that prides itself on a fortnightly development schedule.

Release 26 (released on April 22nd) was a big release for us but didn’t really deliver that much functionality onto the site. Lots of back end reworking and the like. As there wasn’t that much to say I thought I’d save myself for this iteration, where we have something to really get excited about!

Release 27 was about one thing and one thing only. Venue details. The original page for venues hadn’t changed too much since we went live over a year ago and over that time the layout / design hasn’t really kept up with the amount of additional content we have. As a result we went back to basics and rebuilt the page from the ground up. We hope you like the result.

Here are some of the highlights:

Overview

The goal with the overview is to create a hub for all the content linked to the venue. This is usually in the form of a snippet (e.g. descriptions) or a selected item from a bigger list (e.g. reviews, fans).

We’re hoping this model will last us a while as we add more and more community features.

Description

On the previous version of the page we had the full description on the overview. As part of making the overview we’ve given the description it’s own tab. We’ve also moved some other elements that didn’t seem to fit anywhere else onto this tab, like facilities and amenities. We’re going to be doing some more work in this area over the next few months I think.

Menu / Deals

Along with the overview this is the tab that’s received the most attention. We’ve merged the old deals and menu tabs and dropped the simple treatment list for venues where we have a full menu.

We still use the basic treatment list when we don’t have a menu so if you want to really make your venue page shine get in touch and we’ll sort out a full menu for you.

Gallery

The gallery has also had a bit of a makeover. The biggest difference being that we now show full-size images. This does unfortunately mean that when we haven’t been given top-quality images the gallery is lacking.

Ok. Back to work for me. We’re working really hard throughout May to build an extranet system that will allow all our suppliers to manage their details directly. Watch this space.

Another 2 weeks has passed and we have yet another release coded up and live for everyone to play with.

We’ve been focusing a lot on the back-end of the system recently so don’t have a whole lot of public functionality to shout about.

Multi-Venue Products

One of our most visited pages is the main product information page. Something our suppliers have been asking for lately is the ability to see all of their venues which accept a given product. This is especially relevant for someone like Dove who currently have 27 spas spread across the u.k. with a product range that is common to all. It’s certainly more compelling to know that you have options when buying one of these vouchers.

With the new product page you can easily see all of the venues which accept the product, both plotted on a map and as a simple list.

Product - Redeemable Venues

Coming soon we’ll be offering “Chain” pages which enable the showcasing of the brand in a single consolidated place.

Product Map Counters

It’s really only a little thing but as everyone has said how useful the custom map of the u.k. is on the main deals page we thought we’d add a little extra something to make it even better.

Now you can see how many deals are available in each region without having to click through to the listing page!

Wahanda Deals Map - Counters

Anonymous Reviews

Something we wanted from the very beginning of the site was to offer consumers a way of providing reviews without having to give up their identity. This could be for regular customers who have had a bad experience or for someone having a treatment they would rather not advertise to the whole community. Unfortunately this has back-fired a little (pun not intended) and the number of people posting anonymously has been disproportionately high.

As a result we’ve changed the submission process so that only profile of level 2 or above can use the anonymous feature. This should prevent some of the issues we’ve had with bad reviews while still enabling our regular contributors to make use of this option.

Getting yourself to a level 2 is pretty easy.

Check out the ‘More about Points’ page for details.