Going with Bongo. Anyone any experience?

[johnbiggscr]

Ok we ended up deciding to go with Bongo International for our international shipping system, partly due to our E-commerce director using them before in his old position.
Now we just need to get it intergrated with shopsite.
Has anyone had any experience doing just that? Any handy tips and tricks (ie coding) would be handy.

Thanks.

[Jim]

It depends on how deeply you want to integrate with Bongo.

If you just want to get shipping rates you would need to create a custom shipping module to get the rates.
http://shopsite.com/help/11.2/en-US/sc/pro/shipping.api.html
Configured in the backoffice under Commerce Setup > Shipping > Custom Shipping

If you need to do something when the order is finalized then you may also need to create an Order Api script
http://shopsite.com/help/11.2/en-US/sc/pro/order.api.html
http://shopsite.com/help/11.2/en-US/sc/pro/order.api.spec.html

Configured under Merchandising > Order API

[johnbiggscr]

What will happen is when a customer clicks on a button on the cart that says they are an international customer then they will be taken to Bongo checkout page, populated by whatever they had in their cart. Bongo will handle the shipping costs, etc, and will notify us when an international order is completed.

[Jim]

That is probably not going to be doable. There will be no hooks that you can connect back to ShopSite with once they have left the ShopSite cart. So ShopSite will never find out that the order was actually placed.

[johnbiggscr]

I dont think that would be that much of a problem for us.
Bongo would send info to us to say an order was placed, and I dont believe we rely on any information that shopsite specifically records about orders. We dont use the inventory system, we dont use it to record cart abandonment stats etc.

[Jim]

Other issues to consider.
1. Once you direct the shopper to Bongo's site they will not be able to come back to your store if they want to add something more to their cart. They might be able to use the browser back button, if that will work.
2. Lots of features that ShopSite offers would likely not function: Coupons, Gift Certificates, Rewards programs, Quantity discounts, Customer Registration to name a few.
3. If the shopper does complete the order on Bongo's side that will not remove the shopping cart from ShopSite. So the next time that shopper comes to your website and adds something to the shopping cart, they will likely find the previous items still in their shopping cart. You can set the number of days that shopping carts are kept in ShopSite Pro so you could reduce the number of days to 1 so if they come back a day later they wouldn't see their old cart.


You will probably need to use the javascript variables from the cart (only found in Pro level ShopSite stores) to get the information for the products in the shopping cart. You can find a list of the available variables at http://shopsite.com/help/12.0/en-US/sc/pro/cart.variables.html particularly useful will be the Per-product Variables .

Good luck with this. Let us know if you get it working.

[johnbiggscr]

'2. Lots of features that ShopSite offers would likely not function: Coupons, Gift Certificates, Rewards programs, Quantity discounts, Customer Registration to name a few.'

Yeah, the only ones we use in that list are the coupons, and after talking to Bongo we had already decided not to allow coupon usage by foreign customers anyway.

That variable list will be handy but the issue I see us having is somehow populating an array of products that can be sent to Bongo.
They require something similar to (example from Bongo site) :

<td width="115">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_ID_1" value="WC73540">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_NAME_1" value="40 Inch Desk">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_PRICE_1" value="1.00">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_Q_1" value="2">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_SHIPPING_1" value="1.00">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_CUSTOM_1_1" value="category 1">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_CUSTOM_2_1" value="">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_CUSTOM_3_1" value="">
<span class='maintextblue'><a href='#' class='maintextblue'>40 Inch Desk</a></span><br><span class='maintextsmall'>product number: WC73540</span><br></td>
<td valign="top" align="center">2</td>
<td class="maintext" valign="top" align="center">$1.00</td>
<td class="maintext" valign="top" align="right">$2.00</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="115">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_ID_2" value="WC73524">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_NAME_2" value="Corner Connector">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_PRICE_2" value="1.00">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_Q_2" value="1">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_SHIPPING_2" value="1.00">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_CUSTOM_1_2" value="category 1">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_CUSTOM_2_2" value="">
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_CUSTOM_3_2" value="">
<span class='maintextblue'><a href='#' class='maintextblue'>Corner Connector</a></span><br><span class='maintextsmall'>product number: WC73524</span><br></td>
<td valign="top" align="center">1</td>
<td class="maintext" valign="top" align="center">$1.00</td>
<td class="maintext" valign="top" align="right">$1.00</td>
</tr>
<tr>


Which I assume I would replace the variables with shopsite versions, similar to:

<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_ID_1" value= ss_sku[0]>
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_NAME_1" value= ss_name[0]>
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_PRICE_1" value= ss_price[0]>
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_Q_1" value= ss_quantity[0]>

The hard part is figuring out how to populate an array to send to Bongo if more than one product is in the cart. That is why I was hoping someone out there had already gone through this procedure and could provide guidance.

[Jim]

There is a "var number_products=x;" that tells how many line items are in the cart.
A line item may contain multiple of the same items so it would have a quantity of say 3 but the number_products would still be 1)

So you would loop through the arrays of product info "number_products" times to get the values for
Something like this (although this is just pseudo code you would have to get the correct javascript syntax
for x=0; x<number_products; x++ {
y=x+1
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_ID_y" value= ss_sku[x]>
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_NAME_y" value= ss_name[x]>
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_PRICE_y" value= ss_price[x]>
<input type="hidden" name="PRODUCT_Q_y" value= ss_quantity[x]>
}

[johnbiggscr]

That could be indeed be very useful.
Thank you very much.