Online Dating and Matchmaking Industry Forums

datingbusiness · Active-iDate-User Joined: 30 Nov 2009 Posts: 29

I think shopping cart can be useful for dating site or social network owners who want to sell goods to his/her members.

http://www.datingsitebuilder.com/software/shopping-cart.asp
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yorktown · Site Admin Joined: 16 Jun 2004 Posts: 444

Sounds interesting....can you provide some examples of what a dating site operator would sell to their subscribers?

Marc Lesnick
Conference Organizer
Internet Dating Conference

JuliaDorofeeva · Joined: 19 Feb 2007 Posts: 22 Location: Russia

The items for sale are:

(1) Real goods: Dating site owners tend to sell small gifts on their sites using micro payments. Matrimonial dating sites usually offer flowers, candy/sweets and toys.

For those who decide to sell real goods on your dating site, we advise the operator utilize "drop shipping". It allows site owner deliver goods using local providers saving on delivery costs/fees and getting best deals.

(2) Services: Dating agencies also offer travel services in their online stores. For instance, visa assistance, translations of emails between customers, background checks, local travel, hotel stays, etc.

(3) Virtual goods: This industry appears to picking up on this fast. People buy virtual goods using their dating site virtual point accounts. As dating and social networking software developers, Pilot Group sees that virtual gifts are more popular at social networking and community sites than currently on dating sites.

There are several ways to start selling virtual gifts on your dating site:

(a) You can create your own virtual gifts by simply uploading a set of images to your gift store. If the software has the capability, a dating software shopping cart should support this type of goods. If not, it needs to be added on to the system.

(b) Numerous Virtual Gift companies out there in the market offer APIs. They provide database of virtual gifts and generally share revenue from virtual gift sales with you. Integration of the API is unique for each provider. We tried a few of these. While we had no problem with the API, we found the companies generally had their own payment system which conflicted with ours. Also, their tracking will provide too much information of your user database. We decided to make one on our own and offer it to our customers as part of the package.
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Julia Dorofeeva
Dating Pro Online Dating Software
http://www.datingpro.com

yorktown · Site Admin Joined: 16 Jun 2004 Posts: 444

Interesting. Is there any way the 3rd parties could have 'dummied down' the database demands so that they were not getting your critical information?

Marc Lesnick
Conference Organizer
Macthmaker Event