Already I while ago I played around at home with ifttt.com. I connected my ring doorbell with my Philips hue front door light.
This went astonishingly fast, took me no longer than 15 minutes and I could step in front of the door and the light went on. Ok, it was not perfect:
- It had a terrible delay of about 10 seconds (signal went from my door to ring, from ring to ifttt.com, from ifttt.com to Philips and from Philips to my home again)
- The light also switched on at daytime
- The light was not switched off after a certain time
But, still, I was impressed and thought about how to apply this to commerce. After a short research, it became clear, that everything is already there – almost. There are platforms like Zapier or Microsoft Flow and they even have ready to use connectors to solutions like MailChimp or Microsoft Dynamics. As a proof of concept, I created an Intershop connector for Microsoft Flow.
Here a short video, that shows how easy and fast the integration can be when using Microsoft Flow and you have the right connectors:
[dsgvo-youtube url=”https://youtu.be/LCRT9jFV7j8″ images=”https://tech.intershop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Intershop-and-Mailchimp.png”][/dsgvo-youtube]
To realize this integration approach, I needed the following things:
- A generic EMailMarketingProvider that basically forwards all Java methods at REST calls.
- A WebHook registration service, because Flow wants to register for the webhook
- An Intershop connector within Microsoft Flow
When creating the Flow, then a webhook listener will be registered at the webhook service. This is the trigger for the Flow. Of course, multiple listeners can be registered for one webhook. Now, if someone subscribes to a newsletter on Intershop side, then the webhook service is called and forwards the information to all webhook listeners. In our case, the webhook listener is the Flow Intershop connector. This passes the information to the MailChimp connector and the MailChimp connector calls the MailChimp API to subscribe the user.
You may say that this is a very simple example and in the real world is way more complex – and you are right. Still, there are many more use cases for it and I am pretty sure that in the future we will see a lot more low/no-code applications and integrations.
Do you want to know more details? Just use the comment section.