integration with an external site

Drew

1. Has anyone figured out how to pass a variable back and forth between convio ecommerce and an external site?

2. How can an external php site be notified about a purchase?

Adrian Cotter

Hey Drew,

Can you describe a little more about what you actually want to accomplish. Why the external site wants to know about the purchase, for instance?

The first thing that comes to mind is that so long as they are on the same domain

*.mydomain.org

You should be able to pass a cookie. Perhaps on the ecommerce thanks page, set a cookie with JS that the PHP site could read... "user X, purchased: y,z etc."

The only complication being that the the ecommerce site is probably a secure convio one, and I'm not 100% that a cookie would work in this case.

If they are just clicking a link to go back to the PHP site, then the info could be passed through the querystring too (and then put into a cookie, or something else).

Drew

Adrian Cotter:

Hey Drew,

Can you describe a little more about what you actually want to accomplish. Why the external site wants to know about the purchase, for instance?

The first thing that comes to mind is that so long as they are on the same domain

*.mydomain.org

You should be able to pass a cookie. Perhaps on the ecommerce thanks page, set a cookie with JS that the PHP site could read... "user X, purchased: y,z etc."

The only complication being that the the ecommerce site is probably a secure convio one, and I'm not 100% that a cookie would work in this case.

If they are just clicking a link to go back to the PHP site, then the info could be passed through the querystring too (and then put into a cookie, or something else).

Thank you for getting back to me so quickly.

I am relaying this message from my outside developer

-

---

he said,

"all I want is to figure out a way to get Convio to talk to something outside it. I'm not sure how much more I can elaborate on it, it seems pretty straightforward. The part where Convio informs an external site that a purchase has been made is the most important

Cookies will do fine, but how do you set them up with Convio? Clicking a link back to the external php site with the product id in the url would be equally fine. What I'm, trying to find out is how do you do this with Convio, automatically? Do you need to hack it, or do they have something built in that will do this? They must have thought of some sort of integration with an external site, so I'm hoping the latter..."

Does this make sense?

-Drew

Adrian Cotter

Drew :

Thank you for getting back to me so quickly.

I am relaying this message from my outside developer

-

---

he said,

"all I want is to figure out a way to get Convio to talk to something outside it. I'm not sure how much more I can elaborate on it, it seems pretty straightforward. The part where Convio informs an external site that a purchase has been made is the most important

Cookies will do fine, but how do you set them up with Convio? Clicking a link back to the external php site with the product id in the url would be equally fine. What I'm, trying to find out is how do you do this with Convio, automatically? Do you need to hack it, or do they have something built in that will do this? They must have thought of some sort of integration with an external site, so I'm hoping the latter..."

Does this make sense?

-Drew

The reason I asked for clarification is that if the external site only needs to know on one page ( clicked to from the thank you for buying page ) it is an easier problem -- just pass the info through a link. If it could be any page on the other site, then it is somewhat different. Also it matters what information has to be passed, and if it is just being used on the page, or processed into a database. Is it just that a purchase has been made, or more details about the user, or more details about the purchase, then that also has an impact (since both cookies and passing info through links have limits). Another way to pass more information would be to submit a form to the PHP site.

Also, knowing why you want the information presented might lead to completely different ways of doing what is needed.

The bigger problem, however, is that I don't think Convio provides any hooks for the products purchased. Just looked some in the tool, and in the documentation. You can use their s-tags to grab a lot of information, but I don't see much about e-commerce (just the dollar amount is available through the components dropdown).

The only way I can think of getting the product (with my current understanding) would be to write a JS script to parse the product confirmation table and pull out the appropriate items and build the link on the fly. Depending, of course, on what the confirmation page looks like...