Developer Showcase #3: Callum McMaugh, Technical Lead at Giftnote
Background
I’m Callum McMaugh, Technical Lead at Shopify Plus Partner Elephant Room and Co-Founder of Giftnote, a gift messaging platform that sends paperless gift messages directly to the recipient. Our vision is to modernize online gifting for merchants and consumers.
The idea for Giftnote came about when the COVID-19 pandemic kept family and friends apart for important events, so we aimed to close that gap by allowing customers to add gift messages to their orders during the checkout process.
Backed by Elephant Room’s 9 years of experience as an e-commerce agency, and the relationships we’ve built along the way, we dived right in to making an app that would change the way merchants handle online gifting.
Why did I build with Klaviyo?
At Giftnote, we’re focused on empowering merchants by providing an exceptional gifting experience to their customers with paperless and automated gift messages sent via SMS and Email. Giftnote utilizes Klaviyo’s powerful platform to allow merchants to ingest transactional data into the platform they know and love as well as brand their notifications however they want.
Klaviyo Insights: Identify and Track APIs
Giftnote uses Klaviyo’s Track API to identify and track customers and recipients on the fly. When a gift order or gift card is created, an “identify profile” request is fired to let the merchant know both the customer who places the order and the recipient of the gift.
This is where Klavyio gets to shine.
Merchants can set up flows based on those events to send out branded notifications to both the recipient and the customer. They can also segment the customer and the recipient for greater insights into their customer’s shopping habits.
The team at Giftnote values getting data right, and we’re excited to generate these unique signals for merchants to fully realize their gifting capabilities.
Tips, Tricks, and Learnings:
Klavyio accepts JSON (aka sophisticated payloads) so getting data into their system couldn’t be simpler. Any keen developer can integrate with Klaviyo with ease by using their well-documented API to send any type of data they need. Any data you include in the payload is directly accessible in their messaging editors, making it frictionless to get up and running with Klavyio.
When to send the data to Klaviyo from your product?
When we receive a new gift order or gift card, we immediately send an identify request for the users involved. Sets the base for upcoming events. The two key events we focus on are when an order is created so merchants can notify the customer that their request was completed successfully, and another when it’s been successfully delivered so the gift message can be sent to the recipient.
Challenges that were faced/overcome?
Some of our merchants are getting started with Klaviyo, so we’re doing our best to explain and teach them how to create the desired result of their notifications. Examples of this include jumping on a video call to walk through the flow creation, or how to segment the users into the Klaviyo system. Our users appreciate our help, and those who are already Klaviyo experts, they’re very comfortable setting it all up on their own.
Interesting caveats or edge cases?
Klaviyo understandably can’t show users fields from future payloads so it’s best to send a meta JSON payload that includes the fields with empty values. This way, merchants can pre-configure their flows without having to wait for the first payload to come in.
Learnings
Using the Track API was a pretty straightforward integration for Giftnote, but we’re also keen to explore other parts of the system. We’re also interested in expanding the events we send to develop new workflows.
Conclusion
Giftnote is excited to be working with Klaviyo to provide a quality communications platform for our customers. We’re only getting started, and as we continue to grow, we’re excited to keep working with Klaviyo to deliver the best gifting experience for our users.
