Pass Data to a Checkout Page

The most important piece of information to pass to a checkout page is what the customer is purchasing so that the form can be appropriately configured, but sometimes you may want to pass additional data that you want associated with the customer's order. MemberMouse supports passing affiliate information, a coupon code, gift indicator, customer data and custom field data.

Affiliate Information

MemberMouse's affiliate tracking system integrates seamlessly with checkout pages. It provides a powerful way to track incoming traffic to your site from multiple sources. One of the advantages of MemberMouse's integrated tracking is that you can send traffic to any page on the site at the same time. For example, if you're sending an affiliate email you can include tracking links to your landing page, blog, sales page, and more in a single email.

This article will show you how to create affiliate links.

Coupon Code

Sometimes it may be useful to pass a default coupon code to the checkout page. Maybe you've sent out an email with a limited time offer to your members and you want the discount to be applied as soon as they hit the checkout page or maybe you've created a banner ad for an affiliate partner and you want to offer their members a discount to get them to sign up. For both cases, you can simply pass the coupon to the checkout page by using the keyword ‘coupon'.

Say you have a coupon code ‘WINTERSALE12' set up. To apply it automatically to your checkout page, just use the following format:

http://yourdomain.com/checkout/?coupon=WINTERSALE12

or if at the end of a product ID:

http://yourdomain.com/checkout/?rid=p2w15K&coupon=WINTERSALE12

When a customer clicks on this link they'll be taken to the checkout page and the WINTERSALE12 coupon will automatically be applied to their order.

Gift Indicator

You may want to indicate that the product being purchased is as a gift. In this cases, you can simply indicate this by using the keyword ‘gift' and setting the value to ‘yes':

http://yourdomain.com/checkout/?gift=yes

or if at the end of a product ID:

http://yourdomain.com/checkout/?rid=p2w15K&gift=yes

When a customer clicks on this link they'll be taken to the checkout page and as long as the gift check box is present on the form (MM_Form_Field type='input' name='gift'), it will automatically be checked.

Customer Data

There may be a case where you want to pass certain pieces of customer data to the checkout page so that it gets pre-populated in the form. Maybe you collected this data somewhere else and as a convenience you pass it to the form to be pre-populated so the customer doesn't have to enter it again.

MemberMouse supports passing customer data to the checkout page through both GET and POST methods. For each parameter you want to pass you would add it to the checkout page URL in the following format:

parameter_name=value

Where ‘parameter_name' is the name of one of the supported parameters and ‘value' is the default value to want to use for that parameter.

Below is a list of supported customer data parameters:

• first_name – customer's first name
  
• last_name – customer's last name
  
• email – customer's email address
  
• phone – customer's phone number
  
• billing_address – customer's billing address
  
• billing_city – customer's billing city
  
• billing_state – customer's billing state
  
• billing_zip – customer's billing zip code
  
• billing_country – customer's billing country
  
• shipping_address – customer's shipping address
  
• shipping_city – customer's shipping city
  
• shipping_state – customer's shipping state
  
• shipping_zip – customer's shipping zip code
  
• shipping_country – customer's shipping country

Custom Field Data

MemberMouse allows you to create custom fields in order to associate additional data with each member's account. Maybe you're running a membership site related to fitness and you want to know a member's current and target weight. Maybe you want to store marketing data related to Google AdWords campaigns.

Whatever it is you want to collect in addition to MemberMouse's default member data you can do so by using custom fields. If you've included custom fields in your checkout page you can pre-populate these fields by calling the checkout page URL in the following format:

http://yourdomain.com/checkout/?cf_1=banner-20&cf_2=membership

In this example, we're passing two parameters to the checkout page: ‘cf_1' and ‘cf_2' with the values of ‘banner-20' and ‘membership', respectively.

Custom fields are identified by the ID assigned to them in MemberMouse. In the above example, we're pre-populating the custom fields with IDs 1 and 2. If we want to pre-populate the custom field associated with ID 16 we would call the checkout page URL as follows:

http://yourdomain.com/checkout/?cf_16=male