Mailchimp integration at checkout

[AdamKing]

Hi everyone

I wondered if anyone could help. We are looking at ways of adding a newsletter signup checkbox type thing to the checkout pages, that would automatically update Mailchimp during the checkout process. Presently, we use one of the user defined layouts in checkout page 1 to manually gather this information.

I came across this old thread....(http://community.sellerdeck.com/showthread.php?t=50950), the key part of which i have pasted below.

"One way to do this is to amend the "Next" button functionality in the checkout.
The basic idea is:
- Customer enters their email address
- Customer selects "Yes"
- A Javascript AJAX function is called which passes the email address/name values to a PHP file on your server which then makes the API call to the Email Marketing API
- Whether successful or not the checkout then progresses to the next page once the API call has completed (in Javascript terms the AJAX method call would always return true)"

Can anyone expand on this type of idea? Or does anyone have a working example or procedure that we could try?

All ideas welcome.

Thanks, Adam

[malbro]

"One way to do this is to amend the "Next" button functionality in the checkout.
The basic idea is:
- Customer enters their email address
- Customer selects "Yes"
- A Javascript AJAX function is called which passes the email address/name values to a PHP file on your server which then makes the API call to the Email Marketing API
- Whether successful or not the checkout then progresses to the next page once the API call has completed (in Javascript terms the AJAX method call would always return true)"

Can anyone expand on this type of idea? Or does anyone have a working example or procedure that we could try?

Mail chimp has an api that will allow you to add new emails to the mailing list, so to integrate this into SellerDeck you would need to
1/ Add some javascript to one of the checkout pages such that you interupt the action of a button (for example Next) and call an external script on the server that can communicate with the MailChimp API. The javascript passes the email to this script and waits while the script executes and returns, this is the AJAX bit, on the return the javascript simply lets the normal action of the button operate.

2/ The script on the server needs to be programmed to work with the MailChimp API and uses the necessary calls to
a/ check if the email is already in the subscriber list
b/ if not add it to the list
c/ do something if there is a problem (send you an email for example).
d/ send the return response to the checkout page so it can continue

This could cause a significant delay in the operation of the button if there where problems with the Mailchimp server for example so the interface needs to be carefully programmed to avoid too much delay otherwise you get fustrated customers who abandon the cart.

I personally would use PHP as the scripting language but you could use other languages.

[pixelhaus]

Hi Adam,
Did you have any joy with this ?

[Seorch]

I have noticed there is a mailchimp.pl file in the /Sellerdeck 2016/Site1/ folder. There is no further information in extensions on how to implement this script.
What is the purpose of this file and how is it used please?