Behind the Scenes

First I’d like to clarify what Vapospy is and what it isn’t. Vapospy is a marketplace for herbal/concentrate vape products and accessories. We do not sell or ship products ourselves, we work with close to a hundred retailers/brands to deliver you great deals.

Vapospy organizes product information & deals in one place.

Personally, I have owned around 80 vapes in the past years. Some used heavily, some just once. I have a good idea of what’s a great product, and what’s a not-so-good one. Vapes I have tried do have a “Vapospy Rating“, but keep in mind that it’s one person’s opinion. I recommend also reading other people’s reviews or asking questions in a community. (e.g. /r/vaporents is great)

Insights

Let’s dive into behind the scenes. I want to show you which functionalities we provide to retailers for creating deals. We’re starting with the overview that retailers have of their own offers.

Links to retailers’ deals are added by us or themselves, the majority of coupon codes are added by the retailers. We occasionally ask our partners if they can provide special deals for our visitors, often we are able to get them, sometimes we don’t.

We automatically crawl thousands of product pages on retailer websites to fetch the “Price” and “Availability”. This process generally works quite well, but errors can happen, which might lead to showing an incorrect price or none at all. Checking availability is slightly harder, but we’re trying.

We crawl every offer link once or twice per day to update price & availability. How often we update an offer depends on the amount of them in our database, currently, we have more than 3,200+ offers.

Here’s a screenshot of how it looks like when updating an offer:

Retailers have a few options provided. They can:

• Add/remove a coupon code that has a percentage or fixed dollar amount.
• Deactivate the site-wide coupon. It’s possible to define a coupon that is automatically applied to all product offers. The checkbox allows excluding a specific offer.
• Tick the “Price is not correct” box informs us about the error and we’ll take care of it.
• Add an “Offer description” to describe it in more detail. Here’s an example: (It’s the text at the very top)

One more thing retailers can do is provide “general information” about their store and a “site-wide coupon code“. Usually, it’s information about shipping and facts retailers want to highlight about their company.

Technical Insights

Vapospy is built upon the popular CMS called WordPress, you likely have heard of it. More than 35% of all websites worldwide are using WordPress. 🤯 The WordPress theme we are using is developed from the ground up. We try to use as few additional WP plugins as we can and rather focus on making Vapospy as fast and easy to use as possible. I’m a big WordPress fan and it has a very helpful community behind it.

Going Global in 2022

It has been quite the journey over the last 5 years, and there’s a lot more that is happening in the background of Vapospy. I will publish more about it next year. We’re still a tiny team at the moment operating and developing the Vapospy marketplace while publishing product information in four languages.

Our big goal in the coming year is to be able to serve fellow vape enthusiasts worldwide. I can’t wait to tell you more about it when everything is ready probably before the end of March. Besides this mega project, we’ll be working on translating product information into more languages and building other new features. We’ll inform you here on our blog when new features are ready to use.

We have a never-ending list of things we would like to see on Vapospy, if you have an idea that would make your experience better while browsing on Vapospy, we want to hear about it! Feel free to send us an email.

Wishing you all an amazing 2022! 🌟