In October, we announced that we were working on our best feature to date and today we unveil it to the world! Introducing...

Email Subscriptions!

Engage users with curated deals via email without spending a fortune on development. Send us a list of subscribers and we'll send them a branded, daily deal email on your behalf. It's like becoming your own Yipit (without raising $7.5 mm). So what's in it for you?

	Mind-blowing Personalization We partnered with SimpleRelevance to make sure your users receive the most relevant local deals. Users can change their preferences at any time.
	Managed Opt-in & Opt-out Users can opt-in to (and out of) daily emails through a slick hosted landing page. You don't have to build a thing.
	New Subscribers Why should Groupon have all the fun? Grab your visitors' email addresses before they bounce to a 3rd party deal site.

Email us to get started using Email Subscriptions today!

Ever notice your co-worker that shows up Wednesday morning with a golden brown tan when you’re sure she didn't make it down to the Bahamas for a Tuesday night quickie? What about your neighbor who's always roasted to perfection in the dead of the winter despite never taking off that jacket?

Thanks to the marvels of modern technology, there’s more than one way to get brown. The Indoor Tanning Association says indoor tanning in the US employs 140,000+ people, and others estimate that salon tanning services are a $5 billion industry. Whether it comes from a lamp or a can, while laying down or standing up, a host of daily deals turn your local fake n' bakery even more irresistible.

Where are you most likely to find people who include roasting indoors in their beauty routines? We looked at daily deal purchases in America’s largest cities to see which city purchased the most tanning deals in 2011. Using proprietary data (public data & our own), we analyzed the total number of tanning deals purchased in 2011, scaled by city population. Check out the graphic (above).

The data shows that the Lone Star state is home to a LOT of indoor cooking. The winner was Houston, TX, where 17.7 of every 10,000 people purchased a tanning deal last year. They inched out Dallas, which sold 16.4 deals per 10,000 people. Chicago & Atlanta are runners up, and Washington, DC is a notable mention. Congrats to all cities for participating (as if they had a choice).

Looking to improve monetization, enhance local relevance or engage your pale users with relevant, aggregated deals? Check out Sqoot’s daily deal API.

 

 

Happy holidays from Sqoot! Just in time for Christmas, we released an awesome new API call that gives you just what you've always wanted: clicks!

With this new API call you can:

• Increase personalization by tracking which users are clicking on which deals.
• Gain insight into trending deals that drive the most traffic.

Thank you, sir, may I have another? Heck, it's Christmas, why not! We've also added click data to our Commissions API call. You'll see exactly which click drove a purchase all in one beautiful JSON response.

Read the docs.

As always, we welcome your feedback and merry Christmas!

We despise downtime but unfortunately sometimes there's just no way around it.

On Monday, Dec 12th between 4-6PM Sqoot will be undergoing maintenance.

During this window, the site and API will be down. It also means that if people click on a Sqoot deal, they won't be redirected to the deal site.

We will do our best to minimize downtime. Stay tuned to @sqoot on Twitter for up to the millisecond status updates.

If you don't know about our search shortcuts, you should. They make it easy to do common searches. Today, we're adding mobile to the line up: 

• NEW mobile: Only deals for providers that have mobile-friendly checkout.
• metadata: Only deals for providers that support click-to-purchase tracking via our metadata
• timely-stats: Only deals for providers that report stats quickly (usually within one hour)
• daily-deals: Limits results to just the deal providers that give us true daily deals (huge discount, short expiration).
• women: Just deal categories that women love.
• men: Exclude deals that are specifically female-centric.

Just another thing to make your life a little easier. All in a days work!

McDonalds has their "special sauce," In-n-Out does it "animal style." In Utah, Hires Big H calls it "fry sauce." That's their way of making food irresistable. At Sqoot, our secret sauce is our "deal score," our algorithm for ranking the best deals. Today we're sharing it with you by including it in our deal API.

Our deal score is a combination of:

• Commission: We favor deals that offer big payouts.
• Price: Not too cheap, not too expensive.
• Expiration: The sooner the better.
• Brand Popularity: Popular deal advertisers get priority.

The exact formula is a family secret, but deal scores are a big part of how we return deals. We use it as a multiplier against other factors like distance and keyword relevance. For example, if you search for "cupcakes in chicago," the deal score prioritizes results for all cupcake deals near Chicago.

Since there's almost always more deals that space to show them, the score decides which deal is best (aka most likely to be purchased). Order by deal score or tweak your own system based on performance!

As always we welcome your feedback!

Today we're launching two amazing new features of the Sqoot deal platform.

It begins with dynamic image resizing. Now, you can easily work with deal images of any size. Want a 48x48 icon? We're on it. How about 180x150 banner? No problem. Just tell us the height and width and we'll resize images all the way up to 999x999. Heck, if you ask nicely, we'll even crop it for you. See for yourself:

http://images.sqoot.com/614869/48x48C

http://images.sqoot.com/614869/180x150C

And it gets better...

Because we're serving the images dynamically, we're now also able to report on impressions - in real time. This means instead of pageviews, we're able to tell you exactly how many deals you've shown across any platform: social, email, mobile, and web.

And best of all, you don't have to do a thing. Old image URLs still work, the API (and widgets) are using the new image system and from today on your dashboard will also report on impressions. To find out more, check out the documentation.

Happy Thanksgiving and (as always) we'd love your feedback,

Mo & Avand

Starting a consumer deal aggregator is no walk in the park. When GPS Daily Deals, the up and coming deal app that offers the best local deals on everyday services, entered the Apple & Android marketplaces, it faced a ton of competition. DealMap (now Google) & Citysearch were just a few of the big-names, not to mention the 150 smaller players chomping at the bit. *&^%!

What’s a newbie app to do when faced with an onslaught of competitors? Focus on their core offering & eliminate other distractions. 

"Sqoot does the heavy lifting"

Tony Meador, GPS’ CEO, says it best, “I learned from experience to focus on what you can do that’s unique, not recreate the wheel. Sqoot does the heavy lifting. We’ve done the heavy lifting in the past and found that companies that try to do everything out of the gate are better off focusing on a niche -- cut away other items that cost time & money.”

"Killer support made Sqoot a no-brainer...

you respond in hours not days"

 With 15 years of experience developing coupon technology and co-branded apps for mobile carriers like Verizon, Sprint & AT&T, Meador knows a thing or two about product development. GPS chose Sqoot’s daily deal API which aggregates 40,000 deals (queryable by just about anything) from nearly 100 providers. Features like 100% publisher revenue share, consolidated, real-time reporting, merchant ID matching, & killer support made Sqoot a no-brainer.

"There's a real advantage in working

with Sqoot as we grow"

“Our affiliate revenue has accelerated in the last week.” When we need support, “you respond in hours, not day. We’re impressed,” said Meador.

As GPS gained traction both online and in the Apple & Android marketplaces, they offset Sqoot’s monthly fee in a matter of days. In thinking about the future, Meador commented, “There’s a real advantage in working with Sqoot as we grow.”

We couldn’t agree more! Join in GPS' success and get started or contact Mo today!

 

We just released a simple feature that let's you search for deals by time:

• Created before or after
• Updated before or after
• Expires before or after

Just pass in a string to one of these new parameters and it will be parsed into a time or use one of our helpers. For example, you could ask for deals that expire before tomorrow, deals that were created after yesterday or deals updated after Oct 27th.

Our docs have all the juicy details and we welcome any feedback.

Happy Halloween and happy Friday!

p.s. Right now Sqoot assumes times are CST (not ideal, we know). Soon we'll update this so everything will speak UTC with some nice local time helpers.

We've been baggering Yelp to open up a deal API for months. When they finally did we got pretty excited. Now you can earn 10% on hundreds of great Yelp deals nationwide. Best part: you don't have to do anything. Yelp deals are automatically part of our daily deal API response.