Project Overview
The aim of Project X is to allow users to make donations to a charitable cause whilst making their everyday online purchases.
Charities will pitch a project to the Project X team who will choose a unique project that has a financial target which becomes a tangible benefit. When a project from a chosen charity is selected all funds raised until the target is reached will go towards that project. This project will be featured on the site and users will be aware of what project their contributions will go towards.
When a user signs up to Project X, they will have a profile and become part of a community. They will be able to shop through either a merchant directory (searchable, a-z and categorized) or the special offers blog and know what percentage of their sale will be donated towards the set charitable cause. Users will have to log in to the Project X website in order to ensure their donations are recorded in their profile.
After a purchase is made with a merchant the user will be able to see in their account the amount they have donated and what cause it has gone towards.
Technical Overview
The community side of the project will be powered by a Dating Script, this has already been purchased and installed on the test domain www.jemza.com.
This script allows users to sign up, create a profile with images, music, videos, etc and provides the stable base community functionality such as instant messaging, forum integration and other social networking features.
Their will be some modifications required to the dating script to remove the dating aspect of the software during sign up and in the profiles, however this should be relatively simple and far easier than creating the base software from scratch.
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Donations from each purchase will be eligible by signing up to each merchants affiliate scheme; each merchant will offer a different commission for sending sales their way.
A model similar to a cashback site is going to have to be integrated into the base platform. When a user signs up they will be assigned a user number by the base software. This user number will have to by dynamically inserted into the clickref tag of any external affiliate link the user clicks taking them to a merchant. This will allow us to link sales and commissions with each user.
A spreadsheet (see projectx-example-spreadsheet.xls) will be generated by the affiliate networks each day which will detail all sales made through the system along with the clickref. We will need a system that allows us to upload this spreadsheet and match the sales made against the user.
The details for each sale will then be logged in the users profile, along with the commission earned, the charitable cause it will go towards and standard info such as date, time, merchant, etc.
There will generally be four levels of status for a purchase made:
Pending: The purchase has gone through, yet merchant is still to confirm.
Confirmed: The purchase has been confirmed by the merchant.
Paid: The money has been attributed towards the charitable project.
Declined: For whatever reason the merchant has declined commission on the sale, maybe the item was returned, etc.
These status’s will need to be incorporated into the transaction part of the users profile. Also the system needs to allow for updating of a status through the uploaded spreadsheet. i.e:
A transaction has been uploaded as pending, yet a new spreadsheet is uploaded with the transaction now at confirmed, this will update the system.
We will also need to work with multiple affiliate networks who may have different setups, so the ability to add a new setup for each affiliate network is going to be a must.
The donations system will be the most complicated part of this project and we’ll have to work through problems and decisions as and how they arise.
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The Merchant Directory may need to be custom coded as I’m not able to find any available software at present simple enough to integrate. Essentially merchants will need to be categorized, part of an A-Z directory and searchable.
All links through to the merchant website will need to be the affiliate link with the clickref corresponding to the user number so we can associate the sale with them as previously described.
The merchant directory will appear in the members area only and only available when a user is logged in.
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The Special Offers Blog will run via wordpress and will function in typical blog format. The blog will be available to both the guests and logged in users, however is a user isn’t signed in, we should inform them that they could be donating money to charity if they were signed up so please log in, etc.
Don’t give me silly bids – I’ll pay a fair fee for quality work – paid upon completion only.
