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Verifying A Visitor's Subscription Status

zmorrisjzmorrisj
edited March 2013 in Questions

Hey everybody,

A client of mine recently got on board the Sendy train and I have a few questions. I'm not very familiar with some of this technology or the best practices, so I'm hoping someone here will help or at least guide me in the right direction. Here's what we need done:

A visitor comes onto the site and enters information into a search form (let's say they're searching for a dream interpretation). If they've subscribed in the past, they automatically get their search results. If they haven't subscribed, once they click the search button, an opt-in popup will appear.

If they don't subscribe, they won't be able to see their search results. If they DO subscribe, they receive a double opt-in confirmation email along with a link to their search results.

So my main question is, how do I confirm if they've already subscribed? I've used cookies in the past, but this is a poor solution since the subscriber could use a different computer, erase their cookies, etc - leaving their only choice to be resubscribe, which will result in a loss of time and loyalty for my client's brand.

Any thoughts will be greatly appreciated, looking forward to everyone's responses and thank you all in advance!

With gratitude,

Zach

Comments

  • BenBen

    Hi Zach,

    Use the 'Subscription status' API to check if the user is subscribed http://sendy.co/api :)

    Thanks.

    Ben

  • zmorrisjzmorrisj

    Hey Ben,

    Thanks for responding! I noticed the Subscription Status API while looking around for a solution and was hoping I could use it for something like this.

    Though to be honest, I'm not sure how to put it into practice. I've never had experience with API's in the past, so would you be willing to give me the run-down on how to utilize it?

    I'll also be happy to look over a tutorial or FAQ, if you know of any that could be of use in this situation.

    Again, thanks for your time!

    • Zach
  • BenBen
    edited March 2013

    Hi @zmorrisj,

    If you have no programming experience you may consider hiring someone at oDesk to work a few hours to integrate Sendy into your application/website. It won't be too expensive. :)

    To learn how to use the API, you need prior programming experience in a programming language of your choice or the programming language your application/website uses. Learning programming takes time and there's no one tutorial that will let you accomplish what you need in a short time. You'd need to start with the basics, like variables, functions, arrays, understanding the differences between GET and POST etc etc, then test build a website/application/script from scratch to apply your understanding. After which you'll go on to learning more stuff like how to execute a HTTP POST using Sendy's API while passing values in that POST to your application. Your application's script will then receive values passed to it and process them; in your case, the search results script will decide whether to show search results depending on the subscription status passed into it using basic 'if else' logic.

    If you are short on time for this or you want to learn these things later, hiring someone on an hourly basis from oDesk would be the best choice.

    Hope this helps!

    Ben

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