Customised email alerts through MailChimp API - api

I am building a site that runs an automated process every 30 minutes to match up new flights with their respective user. Once this process is completed I want to email the flight details out to the respective user. However the flight info will be different for every single user with their being 0-300+ potential emails.
Is this something that the MailChimp API will allow or do? I found this page http://apidocs.mailchimp.com/api/how-to/transactional-campaigns.php which I am not sure if this effects me. Is the STS more suited to this? http://apidocs.mailchimp.com/sts/1.0/
Thanks
Alex

You should use Mandrill (which replace the STS offer). The cool thing with mandrill is that you can link it with you mailchimp account (It's a different product but it's powered by mailchimp).
Add your templates in mailchimp as usual, and hit the button "send to mandrill". Then just use the mandrill api :
http://mandrillapp.com/api/docs/messages.html#method=send-template
You could also use the feedblock option to display custom flight for each user. You just have to provide dynamic rss feed :
http://blog.mailchimp.com/new-feed-merge-tag-options/

Related

How does one associate a website user with a Paypal subscription?

I am implementing subscriptions to a premium service on a website using Paypal as the payment service. I have successfully created a Catalog Product and Billing Plan through the API, and I am able to get to the payment page on Paypal, but it's not clear how I'm supposed to persist a user identifier through the purchase process.
I assumed it would be something along the lines of passing a user id somewhere, but there's nothing in the Paypal documentation about this. I need to be able to let the user make a purchase and have the Paypal webhook send the confirmation to an endpoint on my site, and that's where I'd expect to get their user id to toggle the subscription on their account on my end.
Is there something I'm missing? There has to be a way to do this cause I'd imagine it's a pretty common use case. If anyone has information or has done this before, I'd love to hear. Thanks.
The only truly secure way I've found when using javascript SDK, is to securely generate a unique custom_id on your server side associated with the user.
Then when you create the buttons, the 'createSubscription' function takes custom_id as a parameter.
Then use a webhook to receive events from your subscription and the custom_id will be present in the body of all BILLING.SUBSCRIPTION events under resource.custom_id.
I am able to get to the payment page on PayPal,
You are vague about what you are doing here. There are multiple ways (and some ways have multiple versions) of accepting subscriptions via PayPal, so it is important that you provide full details about the method you are using.
The time to associate a created subscription ID with a user ID is when it is approved, in the onApprove function if you are using a Smart Payment Button: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/subscriptions/integrate/#4-create-a-subscription

Can the instagram api pull likes and comments from an account that I do not manage

I want to pull likes and comments from any account that I specify. Can this be done with the Instagram API or do you have to have the accounts permissions to pull this info.
Essentially I want to be able to analyze this data without having log in credentials for the account.
Thanks!
Following the June 2016 changes to the API, you will need to invite the other users to be "Sandbox Users" of your API client. And even then, the access will be limited to their last 20 posts. Here's a quick explanation of the new Instagram API rules.
TL;DR
Sandbox users are other Instagram users that you “invite” to your
client. The main reason to do this is so that your app will then be
able to “see” their last twenty posts in addition to your own. In
other words, when they accept the invitation, they show up on the tiny
desert island where your app lives.
So you don't need their actual login credentials, but they do need to accept your invitation in order for it to work. The only other alternative is getting your app through the submission process to "go live" but there are very few use cases which they will accept anymore.

How would I reference a user account on bigcommerce so that they don't need 2 logins?

I have shop.domain.com, and in www.domain.com i have some social stuff going on with a blog, etc. I want users to be able to post comments on the blog, and use the social features without having to maintain 2 separate logins.
Can/should I use the webhook to capture their info when they register and send it my way?
I don't believe Webhooks are intended for what you are attempting to do. If you look at the events that Bigcommerce webhooks support
http://developer.bigcommerce.com/api/webhooks/quickstart
The majority of the events are transactional. You can subscribe for events when a customer is created, but there is no way for you to get a notification when somebody logs into your store.
Can't you include custom javascript in the store template that lets someone connect their Facebook or Twitter account, which can also be used to comment on your blog?

Google Tasks API authorization

I can see many related questions on SO, but none that answers exactly what I'm confused with.
I'm using Google Calendar API in a .NET desktop application that allows user to provide his/her username/password, logs in on his behalf and adds some events to the calendar. Now I want to do exactly the same thing for Tasks feature. I'm trying to use Google Tasks API for this, but have been told that I need to do some OAuth kind of authentication, and even before that, I need to go to my gmail account and set permissions and get my project "key" to enable it.
Now does every user of my application need to do these steps in their Gmail account? Or do I need to do this in MY gmail account once and then my application code will be able to use the generated project "key" to enable my users to add tasks to THEIR gmail tasks list?
Figured it out. For anyone having a hard time understanding this, here it is:
The "key" generation step needs to be done only once per application, not for each user who's going to use your application. To generate a key, login to your Google Account and go to Google APIs Console page. Click API Access button and that's where you can generate keys for different kinds of applications like browser apps, desktop apps, Android apps etc. After registration, you'll need to take Client ID, Client secret and API key from this page and put them into the code. Sample code (.NET) for task creation and several other Google features is available here.
Once your user runs your application, he'll be taken to his Google account in his default browser where he'll be asked if he wants to allow this application to write to his calendar/tasks list. This page will display your logo and description text too that you can provide at registration time. Once allowed, this step won't be required again in the next one hour (this may be adjustable, i don't know yet).

Is there a way to use Shopify API to track placed orders?

I am trying to set up a Shopify store to just handle the payment stuff (checkout). I seem to be able to do everything I want through the API, so users only go to Shopify for checkout.
I used these instructions to send users directly to the Shopify checkout once they are ready:
http://www.shopify.com/technology/4849802-new-feature-cart-permalinks
On that page it says "tracking parameters can be added", but I can't find any further explanation about that anywhere. My problem is that once users are sent to the checkout page, there is no way to track them as far as I can tell. I have my own user accounts. I would like users to be able to see their orders. Is that possible?
You can register to receive webhook notifications whenever an order is placed. The notification will include the user's info (name, email, shipping and billing addresses) along with details of the items they purchased.
If your users have an email associated with their account you can match that with the one on the order and track it that way.
+1 on using webhooks. If you are using the Ruby version of the API I'd like to suggest that you use Sinatra to create a simple endpoint for your webhook to talk to. Something like this should get you started:
require 'sinatra'
post '/webhooks/orders/create' do
puts request
puts request.body.read
end
You can run it like so (assuming you save the script to my_sinatra_test.rb):
ruby my_sinatra_test.rb
And then test it from another terminal with curl:
curl -d "foo=1" "http://localhost:4567/webhooks/orders/create"
Once you get your head around this go ahead and create a Shopify web hook for Orders/Create and configure it to talk to your sinatra app. Have fun!