using third part newsletter service

[shenbo]

The default oscommerce newsletter feature is too simple. I have also checked some of the add-ons but not very impressed. We are thinking of using icontact or constant contact to manage our newsletters and subscriptions. Someone here uses the service of either of the two companies? Can you let me which is better when used together with oscommerce.

 

Though not completely integrated, they both offer subscribe and unsubscribe forms to be added to our oscommerce site. Will adding the forms break the look of our oscommerce website?

 

Also customer services of both companies told me that their systems were not fully integrated with oscommerce, which means we need to export our oscommerce subscriber lists and then import to their servers. It's not a big deal to maintain the lists. The problem is if we disable the default oscommerce newsletter subscription option, our customers won't be able to subscribe to our newsletters when ordering. It may not be a good idea to remind them after they have already ordered. Any suggestions?

[anola82]

Hi I have not used either of those programs but personally I use Microsoft Office Publisher 2007 and it creates really great html newsletters.

[npn2531]

What features do you need? To me being able to mail directly from OSCommerce, simple as the newsletter manager is, outweighed the difficulty of having to use a separate program and maintain a separate database.

 

See this contribution, it will at least solve the issue the newsletter manager running on a shared host account with a large database:

 

http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/6553

 

You can see my detailed explanation of it here:

 

http://www.niora.com/epishire/

[burtonsnow8]

I use php list for my mail system. I have yet to try it but there is an add-on that allows OSC newsletter subscribtions to also be sent with phplist.

 

PHP list is really feature rich and has a pretty decent forum following.

 

O yea, its also 100% free!

 

http://www.phplist.com/

 

 

 

About constant contact. They are a pretty decent mail service. Before using php list I used them. The only downside: it costs money to use. the more contacts you have, the more money it requires.

[npn2531]

I used php list as well and liked it. The only trouble was that I had to maintain a separate database in php list and create the newsletters in php list. It was a pain, however, because people who would unsubscribe to a php mailing would still be in the OSCommerce database, and people who created a new account in OSCommerce were not in the php list.

 

At one time I used an online service called Opt-in Pro. I was able to hook up my OSCommerce database to the mailing service online database so that when someone signed up for OSC they were automatically signed up in my Opt-in Pro database. However when they would unsubscribe, it would not delete them from the OSCommerce database, and the unsubscribe page was on their website and I was unable to customize it much.

 

The neat thing about it was that you could schedule mailings in advance or even schedule a series of mailings, triggered by someone creating a new account in OSC.

 

However, Opt-inPro went out of business.

 

My contribution is overcomes the off shop subscribe and unsubscribe issues, but adds really only one feature to the newsletter manager, that is the ability to throttle down the mailing rate, to a speed compatible with shared host environments.