Reviews On Some Of The Top Groupon Clone Scripts

Groupon happens to be an utterly successful business model for the recent years. The emerging power of groupon in eCommerce industry has resulted in the rise of several groupon clones.

Among them, the most featured clones use a piece of software from off-shore locations like India and China. In this post, you’ll get to know about some of the most popular group buying clone softwares which are best rated in the industry.

Groupon website as all of you know is a very popular daily deal aggregator business. Despite facing a stiff competition from diverse eCommerce business models like Amazon, eBay and Airbnb, Groupon has carved a niche for itself. In fact the underlying business framework is the reason for it as it helps customers find an economic deal, helps retailers becoming more popular and the groupon site owner receives money through commissions.

Recreating a Groupon like website is easier than never before with the presence of readily available Groupon clone softwares that lead to an instant building of Groupon like website. This post aims to bring the widely preferred and best quality Groupon clone scripts to user’s notice.

Top Groupon Clone Scripts

Here is a list of top 13 readymade groupon clone scripts / groupon clone software:

1. Contus GroupClone
2. DealPHP
3. Agriya Groupon Clone
4. Wroupon
5. WP GroupBuy
6. Uniprogy
7. AlstraSoft
8. Daily Deal Builder
9. Groupon Clone Pro
10. GetSocio
11. Eponware’s EponGroup
12. Couponic
13. GroupScript.net

Contus Group Clone

They happen to be pioneers in this field. It is not because of their experience rather it is because of the functionalities that Contus Group Clone (version 4.3.4) has been chosen for the top spot.

Contus, an India based company excels in offering eCommerce solutions in a plenty of ways possible. It has built this Group Clone software on Magento’s shopping cart platform. As it is based on Magento, the software is ultimately secure and stable. Contus itself holds several plugins for Magento which can be downloaded from its very own site Apptha. To be noted, there are a plenty of plugins for Magento than on any other shopping cart. Group Clone, once installed runs well.

However, it seems that it is quite difficult to install straight out of the box. It requires a minimum version of PHP 5.2 installed. Like Magento, this software too runs slow on shared hosts and requires a dedicated host to load normally. While there are a few bugs seen on this software, as the script is built on Magento it can be certainly recommended. In my review, I fully support this script for its greatness in Magento specialization.

Note: An alternate website, called bestgrouponclone.com sells the same software at $100 less. Warning: Based on personal experiences of so many we do not find this script to be a credible product. Any company that does not offer proper support and only accepts “Western Union” or “Moneygram” should be a red flag.

Now let us see what is in it.

• Firstly the 2 in 1 functionality grabbed by eyes. It may sound contradictory but it is readily built and at the same time tailor made to your needs. (Before purchasing this daily deals software clients can specify the specs they want. Based on it they will get the tailor made script)
• This Groupon clone software has been built on Magento platform. So intrinsically you get a lot of features that are associated with Magento. Further it is simple to install and supports a vast range of payment gateways and languages, SEO friendly, responsive built and comes with rich design themes
• The 1 year free cloud hosting is a bonus for the procurer. The website will be hosted on Amazon cloud for free during the first 1 year.
• They also provide apps in Android and iOS platforms for your group buying business.

DealpHP

Named as Wroupon earlier, has been refurbished and re-launched under the name Dealphp. Let us explore what this daily deals business software has in store.

• Installing this software is a straightforward process and requires not much assistance.
• They give the source code the moment you purchase and you can use to perform the required customization.
• The latest version looks pretty cool compared to the previous version. You get a herd of features compatible with multiple languages and all major payment gateways; enable creating SEO friendly URLs, quick login for the customers to sign in while booking a deal.

Agriya Groupon clone

Agriya is an Indian company, which offers groupon clone script that looks clean from the front-end while the back-end is cumbersome. The issues include sending coupons to everyone and the script is built with the CakePHP framework. The price factor of the software varies based on the little changes on it. . Agriya is a major player in readymade scripts arena and their Groupon clone script matches to its reputation. Here are some of the notable features.

• The script has been built to be responsive thereby offering an incredible viewing experience on mobile phones.
• You can view how your business is performing from the Advance Statistics Dashboard as it is said to point out your business’s grey areas.
• Another interesting feature is the wallet system which is sure to impress customers. This feature lets customers to do away with credit/debit cards. They can store the money/reward points they acquire in this wallet and can use them at a future point of a time for another deal.

WP GroupBuy

This is an odd man out in the list as it this groupon clone software has been built on WordPress platform and that is what that makes this daily deals software unique. The list of feature is little but they are good

• There are many themes that come along with this script and they are sure to improve the appearance quotient of your Group buying site.
• The script comes with a responsive design and you have got the QR code voucher.
• For admin, there is the Advance Management Tools, which are sure to help them analyze their business performance better.

Uniprogy

Uniprogy is also a decent choice for building your groupon website. The script is readymade and enables to build your site within a short span of time. Let us see what it has to offer:

Well this is also a good option for developing your Groupon website. This daily deals software is readily built and facilitates Groupon like site building within a rapid time interval. Here are the features

• You will get the complete source code that will assist you in performing customization.
• It enables you to set the beginning and end time for deals. Also you will be able to publish location based deals.
• And then there SEO friendliness and responsive design, which makes it a decent buy.

The information specified here has been referred from the respective sites. To get elaborate information about the readymade daily deals scripts readers are suggested to visit the corresponding websites.

Wroupon

Wroupon is a Chinese-based Singapore company that looks, feels and functions the same way as Alstrasoft does. The script is cheap and available limited in terms of payment processors. Still there are bugs like adding cities and limited payment processors. For the lite version, Wroupon charges $89 and for the full it is $350.

AlstraSoft

AlstraSoft is a China-based company that purposely favors low cost lovers. It is the demo presentation which seems impressive in this script. Apart from that, there are also many bugs in this software, which are listed down below:

• Plain text is not allowed in WYSIWYG editor
• It is hectic to add cities on websites and they are even more difficult to add when using a different character set.
• While adding a website, you need to type “http://” before the website, which in otherwise does not work.
• The price of this script is $178. However a discount coupon code is available by typing in “AS15”.

Daily Deal Builder

Daily Deal Builder is a Groupon clone script that is available on a relatively steep price. The starting price of the script is $400, in addition to the monthly fee for subscribers starting at $25 a month and reaching high as $5000 a month for over one million subscribers. The cost factor of the script is quite bothersome and no one knows whether its functionalities are worthy enough for the cost. There is an optional YouTube video instead of an image.

The payment gateways are limited o Paypal standards and a generic credit card processor. It also seems that you are limited to choosing design and cities/countries. There is also a base currency setting per site. Spending a $400 plus a monthly fee starting at $25 is not worthy at all, while the support is offered within the United States time zones.

Groupon Clone Pro

This Joomla based software has got their demo site from the front end looking promising. But there is no explicit access to the demo site’s back end. It shows in a Google search that for logging in the demo site, the username/password is admin/admin123. And I wonder why the site could be so careless about being professional. And in the back end system, it looks exactly like the Agriya’s platform. Otherwise it is best in payment with payment gateways like Paypal and Authorize.net.

Couponic

Couponic is a Russian-based company. It comes with an exclusive front-end, but a less-than-intuitive back-end. This groupon script is built on the most rarely used “Yii” framework, which happens to be a limitation in it. The script is offered at $200 base price in addition to the $35 for each add on.

GetSocio

GetSocio is a Groupon script where you allow users to do all the work and you’re purposely renting Groupon services from them. It has been recently evidenced that several number of people have utilized this script, just because it is quick and easy to set up. GetSocio is a rental script which is offered on a subscription fee of $15 per month ( free for fist month). 5% of buyer payments is considered as transaction fee.

GroupScript.net

GroupScript is a Bulgaria-based company that sells a groupon clone. The back-end interface looks simple and intuitive like WordPress. However, as you go deep, a lot of technical limitations are witnessed. The front end drop down cities menu is a bit amateurish when compared to its competitors. This groupon script is available on a price rate of $400.

EponWare’s EponGroup

This Groupon clone script is based on Joomla CMS. There is no free demo and it is offered only if requested. The software ships in 3-5 days and I really wonder why a downloadable software needed to ship that long. They can be contacted via a mail addressed to @gmail.com, which rises a question why they do not have their own email service. The support they offer is not that good and the code is encrypted with a limited functionality. The software is offered at $500 excluding skin design for $250, language model for $150, training for $99 and customization for $50/hour.

Groupon.comClone.com

The home page has buttons to guide you to the front and back ends of the site. Everything is organized from the left side and it is fairly easy to pick up. The major problem with this site is there is no place to send out coupons, manage transactions and manage user info. Paypal Standard and Paypal Pro are the two payment gateways supported here. Listed are the price details:

Default template: $250
Unique design: $400
Multi-language: $350
Customizations: $250

Limitations with each individual script

The major limitation I find is, once you buy someone else’s script, you’re at the mercy of these off-shore developers.

The next thing I see is, each of these scripts are limited to only one currency. Also, you would want to have multiple language versions of a site and each of these scripts out-of-the-box don’t support that.

Finally, save for Contus which is based on Magento’s shopping cart where your choice of payment processors is limited. You can add more processors at an additional fee.

Conclusion

While on dealing with off-shore companies, there are certain things which disturbs me. Out of all I find that, all these companies need to be dual minded and need to be active 24X7. While it 1AM – 9 AM in the EST time zone, it is the day in India or vice versa.

That becomes a great issue when you got to work early for the next day. If this could even be dealt with shift duties, the next thing to question about is, the English language. While in India and China, English is well known, it is not their first language. Hence, certainly there occurs a miss communication.

A best off shore company is something that could overcome all these circumstances. To my research, I’ve seen that Contus happens to be the best for the following reasons. The first one is that the system is built on Magento platform and the second is the ticketing support is excellent despite the time difference. And the final thing is they keep on adding new features to make it feel unique and different than other websites. Right from transacting money to database usage, it is the Contus product which I strongly recommend.