Article Subject: Canadian online dating market - Part 5

Dr. Dato’s Brief:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

It’s Just Lunch is a matchmaking dating service catering to busy professionals and relies on a franchise business model across USA and Canada.

Jacquie Brownridge heads the Canadian operation with offices in Columbia (Vancouver, Victoria, the Okanagan), and Toronto. Although not strictly an online dating site ie. having user profiles on their site, it’s more of a matchmaking service. Her recent interview in the Fanny Kiefer says a lot about how her business operates.

Clients would first get a screening from one of the matchmaking consultants to determine their needs and get an idea of their personality. The consultant would then work with the client to match other people based on their attributes and other qualities. Obviously this matchmaking is not going to be easy and will most certainly depend on a good ‘base’ of clients in their database.

The economic downturn of 2008 caused a big drop in the client base and as a result Brownridge had to reinvent her business strategy with the help of her global franchise peers and making a comeback.

itsjustlunch was popular a few years back but slowly making a comeback

Tags: canada dating entrepreneurs, canadian dating market, ItsJustLunch.com, Jacquie Brownridge, online dating market canada

Ignighter

Look and Feel

The homepage of the site is very elegantly designed and crafted and is quite nice to look at. The background of the page is grey and the front is divided into five sections or areas. You can see a very attractive couple on the home page on which the site makes a bold claim about its #1 position amongst the group dating sites in the world.

It also informs about the free services offered by the site and has a sign up button prominently displayed in the middle.

On the right side you can see the search button from where you can search for many of the groups near your location.

Registration Process

Registration process is very simple and there are three basic steps to completing the registration process.

In the first one you need to give your personal information about yourself including name, date of birth, email and password.

In the next step the site asks you for some more personalized questions like what sort of relationship are you searching for on the site, what you do on Saturday nights, and what type of movies you like.

Once finished you receive a confirmation mail.

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Now comes the last step in which you have to upload your profile picture. You can skip the photo uploading step altogether and registration comes with a 3 days free trial.

If you are already a facebook member, you can also register through this facebook account.

Login & Customizing Profiles

User can login via facebook account or you can login via email address and password that you entered during registration. This seems to be a very common thing these days and one where it puts facebook in good standing since all these sites are relying on this mega-site to make life easy for users.

Editing the information following registration is just not there and is not available with the free trial.

Rules like allowing/not allowing persons or groups of specified age, location, type of relations they are looking and thing they have common are just not the part of customization.

Photo Profile Section

As mentioned earlier you can upload your photograph from your computer directly and is common to most dating sites.

You can upload only one photo to your profile and seems like a limitation. The rules for uploading pictures is not there but probably hidden somewhere in the site usage agreement.

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Browse & Search Feature

Browsing through this site is simple as there are very few options available and accessible from the top menu.

This being a group dating site, search is not the primary feature of the site.

For searching there is a search bar at the top of the site where user just needs to type in the place, city and country to search.

You get a list of matched groups that are found in that location.

Unfortunately, the search does not allow you to find groups according to your choice of likes or dislikes.

Messaging

Messaging is designed well comprises of sending mail and Icebreaker but you can use it only if you are a paid member of the site.

You can send unlimited number of messages to the members and reply to them.

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Sending smile, kisses, gifts and IM are also not available on this site.

What’s Missing

Looking at the theme of the site (Group dating site) and living in a cyber-age of web storage, I definitely think videos need to be a part of this site to attract more users and give this site an extra edge over it’s competitors.

I also feel, there should be a wide approach and more questions to be asked in the profile creation part, so that it will be easier for the site to provide a more accurate match to it’s members.

Member Base

The site has obtained a good member base and as the site has been designed for the audience’s of all over the world it has worked well in the far eastern countries such as India and Singapore. See our Dr Dato brief on ignighter Article 1 , Article 2

As I searched near my location, I found most of the groups were near to me and the member’s age group range mainly from 20’s to their 40’s.

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Tags: ignighter.com, jumpdates review, personals free dating site, teenage dating site, top free dating