iOS & Android Mobile App
After working with Great Scott Enterprises in the past to successfully develop the website, iOS & Android apps for their startup ‘Drinking Buddy’. We were happy to have the opportunity to work with them again after they came to us with a new concept for Two Dollar Coffee Club.
Two Dollar Coffee Club is an iOS and Android marketplace app that allows users to find nearest participating venues, and redeem their coffee, as well as gain access to exclusive deals and offers provided by the venues.
Two Dollar Coffee Club had a number of challenges we had to meet on both the admin/venue reporting side, and the front end marketplace app.
An important selling point for the client in order to get venues onboard was the ability to provide in-depth user analytics specific to the venue.
The venues want to be sure that signing up to the product will be beneficial to them and give them the ability to grow their customer base, so the ability to provide in depth and useful analytics was critical.
In the front end, we also needed to implement a payment method to handle the subscriptions without using native In-App Purchasing. This meant we would need to navigate the murky waters of the iOS App Store reviewers to make sure we can get the app through the review process (understandably, App stores want their cut from purchases in the app).
In Two Dollar Coffee Club, the majority of the action happens in the Admin backend website.
This is where venues will log in to view analytics, and manage the details that gets presented in the Front End apps, and it is where the Administration of the overall product occurs.
A great focus on this site was to present analytics in a useful and easily legible manner so that Venue admins can quickly assess the status of the marketplace app usage without needing to spend hours figuring it out.
The first step was planning out the method for recording analytics in the front end apps. We are recording analytics on various things such as number of coffees claimed, number of times users view and then click through into a venue. There are all relatively easy to identify and send the appropriate data through to the backend.
A major component we needed to record was ‘Time spent in Venue’, this was a tricky one as it’s difficult to really tell. We wanted to stay away from Bluetooth beacons as requiring the venues to install hardware can be a difficult sell, as well as it adding additional maintenance to the project. In order to tackle this problem we decided to implement geofencing through Location Services, meaning we could calculate time spent in venues by getting the apps to trigger ‘entry’ into the venues radius, and ‘exit’ of the radius.
Because we had set up Geofencing for ‘Time spent in Venue’, a natural extension of this was to implement Geofence Push Notifications. This allows venues to advertise to app users by triggered a set push notification message when they come within a defined radius of their location.
Using this tool for advertising, such as ‘$2 Muffin with every coffee purchase’ has allowed venues to increase their engagement with their customers, and provides an direct avenue to the customer they otherwise wouldnt have.
Subscription purchasing was handled through integration of Paypal into the apps, this allowed us to setup a recurring subscription product (something that is only available in iOS App Purchases for certain product types), as well as saving the client 30% of the App Stores cut off each purchase.
Outside of the development of the Apps and Backend Admin website, we worked with the client to develop a marketing strategy for promotion of the app. This included development of graphic resources, press kits and a Front End website, as well as assistance with App Store Optimisation.
Two Dollar Coffee Club marketplace app has been extremely successful since launch with over 50 venues choosing to sign up and use the service providing the thousands of iOS and Android app users fantastic access to venues across South Australia.
We are also extremely proud to say we have helped bring Two Dollar Coffee Club into the UK, launching as Quid Coffee Club in June, giving them international success.
The team at Appliquette have been vital to the success of both Drinking Buddy & Two dollar coffee club.
Two dollar coffee club was a new project which we started from the ground up with Appliquette. Once again the teams advice and recommendations throughout the entire project, from design and style to features and tools for both users & venues, helped make the process & product run smoothly.
Having an experienced and pro-active developer not only allowed us to have the app we wanted, but to exceed our initial expectations.