Hi, wondering if anyone has successfully integrated third-party referral tools like Talkable or Friendby with WineDirect? And similarly, chat tools like Lucky Orange or LiveChat? Would love to hear your experience, and/or if you have other suggestions. Our front end is WordPress.
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Hi Tanya,
It depends on the degree you want the integration to be. It’s very easy to bolt on chat tools, which usually only require you to drop some code in on Wordpress and then your WineDirect storefront.
Now, if you are looking to pull information back into WineDirect, that’s where it gets difficult, perhaps prohibitively difficult. WineDirect doesn’t offer APIs that make integrations easy unless they specifically partner with outside platforms like they did Tock.
I’ve seen other wineries build integrations that attempt to pull information back into WineDirect, but for things like referrals, it would be hard because WineDirect doesn’t have a place for that yet. Frankly, I’d recommend against trying to that. Until WineDirect opens things up, it’s going to be hard, expensive, and kind of janky.
But Live Chat/Chat Bots is easy peasy. Just expect WineDirect and your Chat platform to live independently. We have used several of these tools and they can be awesome ways to interact with your customers and also drive sales.
Oh, and if you area really keen to add referrals, please vote for this idea:
I’ve never used any referral tools, but I have LiveChat enabled on my site and have had it enabled for 4-5 years. I’ve used it with Wine Direct hosted sites and also our custom CMS site.
I’ve been happy with it! It’s fairly easy to set up, it is a great way to connect with customers, and I like the offline message feature.
Was there anything specific you wanted to know? I’m happy to answer any questions!
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Thank you! I just wondered how hard it was to enable the chat for use across the WineDirect shop, and it sounds pretty easy. I figured that was the case for the referral tools.
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Did you just drop the code into the custom javascript? Thanks!
It was a long time ago, but I seem to remember that the custom javascript field didn’t work with livechat. I’m pretty sure I pasted the code in our templates.
Now we are on a custom site with product widgets, and we have it integrated into our site by our developer.
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So you no longer use WineDirect for your store? We have WordPress on the front end but have our eComm on WineDirect (or will shortly, moving from WooCommerce). I would like to have the chat option on the store as well. We use Tidio for chat.
@EdFarmCollective Do you know if I can drop the JavaScript into the custom javascript? I am not looking to pull data. I can do that manually. Thanks!
There’s two ways of using WineDirect. You can use WineDirect as your CMS for your site or you can use a popular CMS like WordPress and use WineDirect’s remote widgets to embed things like products. You’ll still check out via a WineDirect cart, though.
You can sometimes get it to work by pasting into the global custom javascript field in the website settings, but whether it works depends on your site or template.
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Thank you