sorry I posted this in the google group before I realized you had moved this type of question to stackoverflow
I’m developing a web app with an e-commerce component based on shopify as a white-labelled product for our clients. Our app allows our clients’ customers to purchase a subscription to a product for use within the app. Each of our clients will have a separate shopify store. We have a web interface that allows our clients to create products and we use the shopify api to create the products in their store via an app. We have installed web hooks to receive notification of payments so that we can create the appropriate records in our system to allow the customer access to the product they purchased.
So far, the plan has been to provide a product list on our site with a ‘Buy Now’ button that adds the product to the store’s cart and then direct the user to checkout using Shopify’s checkout system. In the fulfillment web hook, we get the cart token so all we need to do to link the two systems is record the cart token temporarily in our customer database and then we can credit the right user with the purchase.
The problem that we are running in to is that there seems to be no way to link the cart / order / payment to the user that is actually logged in to our system. We are still under development so we are using test stores and the domain of the app is different from the domain of the store (and that may be the case in the production system too) and it is seemingly impossible to figure out how to link the two systems.
I have tried a couple of different approaches …
1) use a form and post to the store’s cart/add.js with a return_to=back
This seems successful in that the items are added to the cart and opening the cart in a new window takes them to the cart they added the item to, but there is no way to associate that cart with the user on our system since we can’t access the cart token in a separate domain
2) use a proxy (our system is written in nodes) to post to the store’s cart and intercept the cart token.
This also works in that an item is added to a cart and we can access the _session_id and cart cookies from the response, but I don’t seem to be able to set those cookies in the browser. Going to the store’s cart doesn’t show the item just added and the store gets a different cart token.
Is there a different approach or should one of those work?
Should we be doing this entirely differently?
Cheers
Paul
Your best bet is to put something in cart attributes when the order is created and use that when you get the webhook to link the order to the other system. You could have a simple json endpoint on the other server to get back the currently logged in user, or have them enter some user is on the cart page and store them in the cart atributes. More on cart attributes http://wiki.shopify.com/Ask_customer_for_additional_information