StoryofaStartup.com

Just a quick note, the Future Shop 2009 Boxing Day Flyers, the Best Buy 2009 Boxing Day Flyers and the Dell Boxing Day 2009 flyer have been released into our Boxing Day flyers section!

Boxing Day is in full swing at RedFlagDeals.com!  We’ve started posting the first boxing day flyers!

In other news, we’ve got over 400 coupons now listed on MrsCoupons.com.

Busy, busy, busy!

One of the benefits of building your own platform is that you can easily adapt it for other projects.  We had that in mind when we built our Coupons platform for RedFlagDeals.com and we’ve now used it to launch a US coupons site, MrsCoupons.com.  We’re going to spend the next few months building out the online coupons database and if things go according to plan, we’ll add additional features to the site.  It’s been a fairly quick site to launch and it should be an interesting one to watch.

If you didn’t see the press release that went out about a month ago, we’ve partnered with United Sample to build a Canadian online survey panel.  It’s an interesting project for us, because usually we’re on the other side of the white label with our various PriceCanada.com co-brands.  We’ve worked with United Sample over the past year to offer paid surveys to our readers on an ad hoc basis, but this new panel will allow us to have an ongoing relationship as well as offer our advertisers the opportunity to offer surveys to our panel.  It will be interesting to see how it goes.  There has certainly been an appetite within the community for paid surveys in the past.

Much of what we’ve been working on over the past few months has been making the various sections of our site more modular and platform based.  For example, we’ve redone the credit cards comparison section so that it can operate as a white label solution (we added a credit card payment calculator as well) and we’ve created a self serve coupons platform that local advertisers can use to add coupons to our coupons section.  Unfortunately, since much of this had to be built from the ground up, the changes aren’t always immediately noticeable to users, but they should pay off as they allow us to scale and add further functionality.

The Future Shop Beat the Clock thread on RedFlagDeals.com isn’t a pretty place… basically FS is running a promo where they have a great deal at a specific time that they announce on Twitter.  There are only a few actually in stock at the promo price though and the flood of people they are sending at once is breaking their check out, which means a lot of people are getting their orders canceled.  I’m guessing the marketing folks didn’t give a heads up to the tech folks…  I wouldn’t want to be in their CS department right now.

A couple of short notes.

We’ve been working with some content partners and have added over 200 GTA restaurant coupons to our Coupons Section.  Worth a look if you’re dining out in Toronto.

We’ve decided to focus the RedFlagDeals.com blog on ecommerce news and consumer issues.  We plan to update it more often too.

We’re sponsoring CaseCamp next week.  It’s going to be a very busy week for us, but we’ll be there for at least some of the conference.

Derek was on BNN earlier this week (despite being on vacation in Las Vegas) discussing loyalty programs and you can check out the clip here.  We’ve done a number of media appearances lately, including a spot on Canada AM last week.

The big news today is that we’ve launched the redesign of our deals for women subsite, Scarlett Lounge.  I’m not directly involved with the project, but I’ve watched our team work hard over the past several weeks to conceptualize, build, and launch the site.  Congratulations team!  I think the new design is much improved, so go check it out!

It’s been a busy year!  There were actually a couple posts that I made that were lost when the server the blog is hosted on failed.  Here are a few highlights of the past year:

• We had our biggest boxing day ever with over 50 million pageviews in December.
• We completely redid the front and backend of our free coupons database.
• As a result of the recession, there’s been a lot of media interest in RedFlagDeals.com.
• We have nearly 1800 followers on Twitter now.
• Our 3rd Annual Member Awards are currently being voted on by our members.
• We redesigned our Credit Card Comparison section.
• We moved to a new office closer to downtown Toronto.  We even have banners up.

Work continues on the Coupons section, particularly as we start to focus on more local coupons.

We recently launched a new section at RedFlagDeals.com that auto-generates a page that lists all of the one day specials that have become so popular with Canadian online retailers.  You can check it out here: Canadian Daily Deals.  It features deals from retailers like Dell, Sears, HomeDepot.ca, Well.ca and more.  There’s also an RSS feed you can subscribe to.  It wasn’t a major project, but it’s turned out to be pretty useful and pretty popular, so I thought it was worth a mention.

To follow up on an older post, our Garage Sale section proved to be popular this year.  We had over 1200 sales listed and over 100,000 pageviews during the season.  Not bad for a project that took a few days to build.  We’ll make some refinements for next year’s garage sale season now that we have a good base to work with.