The WPGroupbuy theme for WordPress has been created to enable you to build a group buy daily deals type website such as Groupon and the many other niche versions of this type of site.
This theme and plugin combination includes an impressive selection of powerful features, as well as a great design, that will enable you to have your site up and running in no time at all. In this post we will take a look at the features of this theme and find out just how easy it is to use in order to create a daily deals group buy website offering products and experiences to your visitors.
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WPGroupbuy Features
Here is a quick overview of the WPGroupbuy features, before we go into the more interesting details in more depth:
- Create multiple deals
- Promote products and services with vouchers
- Organize deals using locations and categories
- Setup discount pricing of deals
- Shopping cart which saves contents
- Support for gift purchases
- Add tax and shipping rates
- Display countdown timers
- Run a reward points and referral program
- Integrate email subscription service
- Accept multiple payment methods
- 17 page templates and 8 homepage styles
- Facebook login
- Responsive design for a mobile friendly website
Dynamic Pricing
With WPGroupbuy you can easily setup dynamic pricing. This means you can set the price of an offer to different amounts depending on how many are sold.
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Through this feature you can either increase the price after a set number are sold, or decrease the price as more are purchased. This can either help encourage more people to take advantage of an offer as it becomes more popular, or create a sense of urgency by increasing the price as more purchases are made.
Limited Offers
When creating a deal and adding it to your site, you can set the offer to expire after a set date or time, or once a certain number of purchases have been made. You can also limit the number of purchases each user can make of an individual offer.
Promote Physical Products or Vouchers
To help you list a diverse selection of deals, you can easily list either deals for physical products, such as those sold at other online retailers, or promote vouchers for experiences such as dinning discounts or day trips.
With this theme you can add a URL to your check out page which the user is forwarded to where they can buy the item. This allows you to promote products as an affiliate and let the merchant handle the checkout process, while still earning you a commission of the sale.
Responsive Design
To ensure your site can accommodate the growing number of mobile internet users, the WPGroupbuy theme is full responsive for use on a range of small screen devices. To check out the themes responsive capabilities, scan this QR code with your phone or tablet.
Setting up WPGroupbuy
Using WPGroupbuy on your WordPress site involves installing both the theme and the plugin files which are included in the package. There is also a list of recommended plugins that you can install. Once you’ve activated both products, you can begin configuring your group buy daily deals website.
The support documentation covers all you need to know when it comes to setting up your site in an easy to read format. The theme also comes with demo content which can be imported to help you get a better understanding of exactly how the theme functions. Importing this demo content is recommended as this theme does include a lot of different pages and content which will make your life easier if they are present on your site.
The main settings for the theme can be found under the top level menu item which is added to your WordPress admin dashboard.
The interface for WPGroupbuy uses the native WordPress UI helping it to integrate well with the rest of the core WordPress functionality. The control panel is divided up into multiple pages, each with their own set of tabs, making this a very configurable theme.
The main sections of the control panel are organized as follows:
- WPGroupbuy: overview and stats dashboard for your site
- Management: manage vouchers, payments, purchases, and user accounts
- Settings: general options, email service integration, email templates, payment gateways, shipping and tax rates
- Theme Options: website logo, custom CSS, etc.
- WPGB Tools: enable add-ons
There are a lot of settings available to help you configure how your site works and looks. However, the different options pages are well organized and the individual settings are clearly labelled to ensure you know which features the settings correspond to.
Creating and Managing Deals
Once you’ve set your site up, you can begin creating content. As this is a tool to build group buy daily deals type site, the package adds a new custom post type to your site entitled Deals.
From here you can create and manage existing deals, and also setup the terms used by the deal-specific categories, tags, and location taxonomies to help organize your deals.
WPGroupbuy adds a few new icons to the post editor which allow you to insert a range of elements into your pages using shortcodes. These shortcode elements include:
- Alerts
- Accordions
- Call outs
- Columns
- Icons
- Icon boxes
- Maps
- Pricing tables
- Pullquotes
- Teasers
- Tabs
- Tables
- Video
The above is just some of the options available that can be easily inserted into the content area when creating a new deal, or any other content on your site. The icons do clutter up the post editor slightly and would be nice to see an option to add them to a drop down menu for a cleaner interface.
When it comes to creating a deal for your website, as well as the new post editor icons, there are a few custom options panels that accompany the WordPress post editor on the add new deal screen.
Alongside the option to set a deal expiration date, there is also a custom options panel that contains the following options:
- Redirect URL for buy now buttons
- Pricing with the options to enable dynamic pricing
- Set purchase limits (minimum, maximum, maximum per user)
- Deal details and small print
- Setup vouchers (expiry, logo, instructions, redemption address and map)
- Select a merchant
- Set a featured image
With WPGroupbuy you get a full selection of options for setting up your deals to meet your needs. Once your deal is ready, you can press the publish button to set it live on your site and make it visible to your visitors.
Depending on how you’ve configured the site, the deals will be displayed until they reach their expiration date, or reach the maximum amount of sales allowed.
Support and Documentation
As this is a feature packed theme, and building a fully functioning group buy daily deals website is no mean feat, it’s important that a theme of this type is well supported and documented.
WPGroupbuy doesn’t disappoint on this level and there is lots of online documentation to help you get started and make the most of this theme. The documentation can be found at the wiki knowledgebase, and is divided up into easy to manage categories.
Depending on your chosen pricing plan, you will get access to different levels and durations of user support from the developers.
Pricing
WPGroupbuy is available to purchase on four different pricing plans. Each plan includes the theme and plugin which are required to build your daily deals website with WordPress.
- Bronze: $79 – use on 1 domain
- Silver: $149 – use on 1 domain
- Gold: $199 – use on 5 domains
- Platinum: $299 – use on unlimited domains
The features vary from plan to plan, including the number of sites the package can be used on, and also the length of access to support and updates. To view the full details of each plan visit the WPGroupbuy pricing options page.
Conclusion
WPGroupbuy contains everything you need to create a fully functioning group buy or daily deals website, all you have to do is find the deals and offers to promote. The theme can be used to list any number of offers such as physical products, digital downloads, or vouchers for experiences, such as dinning or spa treatments.
The included documentation makes setting up your website, which has the potential to be a difficult task, a simple and stress free process so if you are looking to create a daily deals or group buy website then WPGroupbuy is a solid choice.
