Groupon And nopCommerce: Seamless Integration

Deal-of-the-day website Groupon has enabled millions of businesses, small to large, to expand their client base with discounts. Launched in late 2008, the site is now valued at several billion dollars.

Perhaps the most valuable benefit of Groupon to the business is that even if a customer fails to make a purchase, they’re now aware of the business’s presence; Groupon effectively builds audiences and drives attention (as well as clicks).

One vteams client had begun using discount coupons for his own site, generated by Groupon, subsequently combining the sum of them manually in his Shopping Cart, a nopCommerce function.

As one might imagine, manual calculation is time-consuming. It’s also incredibly unnecessary with consideration of modern technology. The fix, however, wasn’t as easy as it sounds.

As nopCommerce is an open source eCommerce solution, ASP.NET MVC 4.0 based with a MS SQL 2008 backend database, there were major limitations and issues when we first got our hands on the project.

Firstly, the coupon generation process was a paid service in Groupon. Secondly, compiling and adding large numbers of coupon codes in another system was a hectic and unreliable job.

Third, we faced a unique request from our client that his customer be allowed to present coupons physically to any restaurant counter even if that customer is not redeeming the coupon online.

Thankfully enough, nopCommerce offers existing options for discount coupons, including support coupons, support discounts, the ability for discounts to be assigned to products as well as to a whole order, and “one time only” discounts.

In order to figure all of this out, we devised a solution to customize the existing nopCommerce discount module, removing any dependency on Groupon. We also created two new categories in nopCommerce, including an auto- and multi- coupon discount function.

As the result, our client is free from the semi-ridiculous task of manually inputting data, has fully automated his processes and is saving money on purchasing coupon codes from Groupon.