Hi,
We are developing our online store and would like to send receipts with specific notifications to our customers. We use stripe as our payment platform and they offer a basic email notification service but it is unfortunately very limited.
Anyone could give me some hints on how to implement email notifications in Xojo? Should I use what Stripe call “WebHooks”? Anyone knows how they work? What would be the best or simpler tool to build the email template? Anything else I should care about?
You could develop a web hook endpoint and then send the email from your web app.
You could also use zapier.com to automatically send emails through Mailgun whenever a Stripe charge is conducted. This would give you a proof of concept that works in about 5 minutes. It all depends on:
I use mandrall from mailchimp. It is an transactional email service that you get the first 12k/month emails free. You send the email via a REST API call to their api. If you are a mailchimp customer (of any level), you can take a mailchimp email template and use that as a templete in mandril. So if you wanted to send an email after someone bought your app, you can design a “thanks for buying our software” template in mailchimp and send a directed email to each customer once they buy a piece of software.
the draw back to using them is they will only send # emails per hour for you. # is variable based on your “rating” with them. How much you send. How many bounces. How many unsubcribes. etc all go into that rating. Now if you go over your quota, they just queue up the email and will send them as soon as you go below your quota.
they have a nice dashboard that you can monitor your rates/rating/etc on. plus their API doc is very nice. Plus you can open support tickets to ask questions and they are very responsive/helpful. It generally takes about a day to get the first response but after that they seem to be pretty quick to respond.
good luck.
Thank you guys,
I will give the duo zappier/Mandrill a try. It seems very easy to set up. I’ll post my thoughts on the process later on… Thanks for sharing the links!
I’ll throw in what we do.
We don’t write our own shopping cart, but we use osCommerce. They have a feature where you can call a CGI from your website. We use this to do some processing (not payment), send some emails using our hosters sendmail (actually EXIM), and pass control back to the osCommerce thing.
This is AFTER the payment happens and we are passed the Approved result code from the payment script (which is 128-bit encrypted of course).
The other suggestions are sort of a bulk-email thing where you are interfacing with their API to send emails your via their SMTP. But you can do your own, as described above, for free. The advantage of Mandrill etc. is you have less chance of being rejected or passed to a spam filter, but I sort of don’t agree with that. I’ve programmed and experienced both but spam filters and ISP blocks are so variant that the improvement is negligible.
Personally, I like doing it completely myself. That way I have full control and no one to “blame” if things go wrong.
What are you developing your online store with?
Are you using Xojo or are you creating server side scripts with something like PHP?
I don’t know why everyone’s recommending bulk email solutions to you, it sounds like you’re sending out a receipt for payment. I +1 the idea of doing it completely yourself (I have for the Answers shop) and sending email with php is easy.
[quote=129633:@Tim Parnell]What are you developing your online store with?
Are you using Xojo or are you creating server side scripts with something like PHP?
I don’t know why everyone’s recommending bulk email solutions to you, it sounds like you’re sending out a receipt for payment. I +1 the idea of doing it completely yourself (I have for the Answers shop) and sending email with php is easy.[/quote]
Sending email is easy. Having it reliably delivered to the users inbox is another. Unless you have a reputable IP address and/or mail server that is well established many freebie email accounts will flag the email. It’s just easier via API or SMTP to send using one of these larger providers as their reputations are solid. They have mechanisms in place to prevent spam and most every service accepts their emails without question.
I have been through the mill trying to find good merchant solutions to couple with my web site. I even wasted $15 on a so-called Stripe solution being sold by a member of this forum. In the end I found that Paypal was head and shoulders above the other merchants in their flexibility and ease of integration. You can integrate with xojo code in a one line solution. My two cents worth; go with Paypal.
@Chris: how do you send a license to your customer?
I sell hardware, not software. For the HTML on my site, I use a program called Rapidweaver that supports many thousands of add ons and modules called ‘stacks’. These include modules for selling virtual commodities sock as software.
I have been using Paypal for about the same amount of time as RB.
Recently, I modified slightly my PHP Instant Payment Notification listener to point to a Xojo web app handleURL which generates the license number for the encrypted RubberViews and send that to the customer.
I have tried to use the Web app directly as IPN listener, but never got it to work, hence the use of PHP as front. Could be because Paypal expects HTTP 1.1 and I did not figure well enough the new Xojo.Net.HTTPSocket. But if someone succeeds making it work it would be great to share that.
[quote=196160:@Michel Bujardet]I have been using Paypal for about the same amount of time as RB.
Recently, I modified slightly my PHP Instant Payment Notification listener to point to a Xojo web app handleURL which generates the license number for the encrypted RubberViews and send that to the customer.
I have tried to use the Web app directly as IPN listener, but never got it to work, hence the use of PHP as front. Could be because Paypal expects HTTP 1.1 and I did not figure well enough the new Xojo.Net.HTTPSocket. But if someone succeeds making it work it would be great to share that.[/quote]
You discussed this problem in a previous post, but I am not getting it. Whats the difference between using Paypal’s IPN via email or IPN as mentioned above??
@Chris: I don’t think that Rapidweaver has support for AquaticPrime. I’m using Rapidweaver myself for my website.
If you are using RW6 then I think you can implement AquaticPrime server side via the Java embeds. Never done it or even tried it myself, but looking at some of the GitHub docs, it looks feasible.
@Chris: thanks for the idea. Will check this out!
I’d like to send an email from a Xojo desktop app. The example refers to a Mail Socket that I can’t find in the 2015 3.1 version. What I have to do?
Thanks in advance.
You should create your own new topics instead of bumping unrelated ones.
There is an example of sending email in your Xojo install:
Example Projects/Communication/Internet/Email Example.xojo_binary_project