Adding forms:More mashups for my Shopify ecommerce store
Written by: Jonathan Briggs
September 6, 2008 [3068 views]
As part of my preparation for the new year of teaching I have been building and running a complete ecommerce store in partnership with traders at London's Borough Market. This sells French Food such as duck confit and foie gras and is powered by Shopify.
Running a successful store is much more than simply building it and hoping customers will come, and so every week I have to make changes; adding new products, updating promotions, finding link partners or changing prices.
This week we have been working with our trade supplier France Direct to add a new section to the site that will handle trade enquiries. Adding a new page in Shopify is straightforward and the design can be tweaked using their templating tools and some basic HTML and CSS knowledge.
France Direct want to hear from other potential retailers who would like to sell the same sorts of products as The Market Quarter and my first plan was to simply have an email link that would allow enquiries to be handled. But a better solution emerged; why not have an enquiry form that would validate the information provided and then post the data to France Direct.
Producing an email form is straightforward but we need a server somewhere that allows the data to be posted. Usually I would just use an experimental server that supports my teaching but instead I went out looking for a service that would do the whole forms, validation, spam checking, data recording and sending. I found JotForms.
This seems extremely powerful with a great WYSIWYG drag and drop forms editor plus plenty of customisation. Better still, it is free up to 100 uses a month. Beyond that and I will either have to pay £5 per month or find another approach but if I am getting 100 enquiries a month, I will have probably increased my revenue and will be able to afford it anyway.
This is the beauty of using Mashups; combining third party data and tools to prototype and explore the things you need. There are a huge number of them out there and there is now almost no excuse for everyone not to build and run their own online experiments.
Recent comments:
What do you think?
On September 10, 2008 at 12:33 PM, Andy Geldman wrote:
I think your point about prototyping is important. Often the shortcoming of plug-ins/widgets/mashups is that they seldom have sufficient configuration settings to work in exactly the way you want (if you are picky like me!)
It's not unusual to see sites that don't quite hang together because they over-rely on plug-ins, when a little coding could result in a more consistent design.
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