3 replies to this topic

[nicknsj]

Hi,

Hopefully some one can help me out.

I understand that you can purchase separate email marketing software and auto responders etc but how do these work when you are using a third party shopping cart.

For example,

You use the shopping cart software to design a great site but you want to include the ability to capture buyers email addresses as they finish their purchase. Does the shopping software allow you to add other companies email packages or not.

Im really confused. I understand the separate processes but how do they work together?

Nick

[Randy]

Usually it's going to require an extra step to integrate the two Nick. You may find some carts that allow you to easily integrate 3rd party mailing lists, but they're few and far between. Plus there are so many different possibilities on the mailing list side of things I've not seen anybody support all of them.

If the mailing list is something that is installed on your server you can usually simply tweak the code to save the email address and whatever other information you need in its (second) database.

If you're using an off-site provider the way I've seen it done most often is to tweak the shopping cart code so that it sends the information --via email or by sending the data to what amounts to a hidden form for mailing list info-- to the list address.

[DIGITALLYDEFINED]

Hi Nick,

If you are using shopping cart outside your website, then it would be really difficult to find some provider that also allows you to manage emails as all the information is stored on the Shopping Cart server.

Solutions at hand:
1. Get a customized shopping cart made for your site.
2. Or you can also try to keep records of all emails you received on confirmation of orders in an Excel or Access database so that you can easily use them in future.

Regards,
Gaurav.

[atlantaec]

Nick,

Take a look at PDG Software's cart offerings. Without the expense of a custom developed solution, you can host your own shopping cart on your own site and still customize to your needs. The PDG Shopping Cart will create a comma-delimited file that includes customer information, which can easily be harvested within Excel, Access, etc. The PDG Commerce product records this information directly in a commercial database (e.g. Access, SQL, mySQL, etc.), allowing you to link any ODBC compliant mailer directly to the database.

There are talks of offering a built-in newsletter management tool and mailer in Version 5 (due later this year), but I don't know for sure if it made the cut.

Doug